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Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

321 points by thg 5y ago

andix 5y ago
I replaced my Facebook addiction with HN. Much better here and I learn useful things during procrastinating.
ChicagoDave 5y ago
I disagree. If someone provided a simple service for friends and families to share photos and updates, it's possible Facebook could be disrupted. I have no evidence to back up my claim, but I think those are the only things people truly care about. It is the only thing I miss after deleting it two years ago. I certainly don't miss Messenger, the Feed, or news.
- buildsjets 5y ago
  You mean something like Cluster? Our family has used it for years. https://cluster.co/ https://cluster.co/
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Imagine if nicotine had network effects (edit: I mean as strong network effects as fb). You can't quit unless all your friends do too. I hear some alcoholics have a similar challenge when their social life revolves around drinking with peer pressure not to abstain.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  >Imagine if nicotine had network effects. You can't quit unless all your friends do too. As a former smoker, it took me moving from an office full of smokers to an office where I was the only smoker to finally motivate me to quit for good. I tapered down over about a year with a vape though, and I think that almost has an anti-network effect in that you kind of look like a bellend!
  - ugjka 5y ago
    Nicotine patches and Wellbutrin; I can be around 100 smokers and not give a shit
- speedybird 5y ago
  My father picked up smoking when he joined the Navy so that he could participate in the smoke breaks. Fortunately he managed to quit when he got out. I wager many started smoking for the same reason, and never quit.
- tombert 5y ago
  While it was fortunately never a problem for me (I've never really drank a lot), when I did business travel for a living, it was pretty common to go to bars after work and expense some drinks to the company (the CEO knew about this, we weren't breaking rules). I remember thinking that if I were an alcoholic, this would either be the best job in the world or the worst job in the world, depending on your perspective. I can't imagine how much harder it would be to actually quick full-blown alcoholism if all the booze is free. Obviously you were allowed to just buy a soda or seltzer or something, and that's usually what I did, but I could totally see it being ten times harder to quit when all your drinks are comped and all your peers are drinking around you.
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Me stopping drinking ruined my career. I was unable to compete in the deep dark of late night initiation/boozing ceremonies that still drive most major business deals in certain verticals. When you’ve puked next to a ceo, they take your calls.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  It does. It's pretty common for friends groups to grow around everyone at a school, a dorm, an office, that take smoke breaks together.
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    True story: I once got a major promotion because the boss was a smoker and he overheard me talking about coding - "oh, you can code?"
acoye 5y ago
I quitted 8 years ago, banned in my personal DNS, never looked back. I use private chat apps to replace it, and full disclosure I enjoy from time to time loosing some time on twitter. INT-P speaking, this may be helping me.
twistedpair 5y ago
Phew, managed to quit FB in 2009.
donw 5y ago
I disconnected from nearly all social media about four years ago, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I did not even notice the recent Facebook outage in my daily life, and wouldn’t have even been aware of it without HN.
- throwaway123x2 5y ago
  I noticed right away because whatsapp went down. Pretty much all my social media is on whatsapp now.
- sibeliuss 5y ago
  Same here. It's been glorious getting all of that wasted time back. (To say nothing of the weird, latent background depression that suddenly vanished when I deleted said accounts.)
- standardUser 5y ago
  In the past several years I was able to leverage Facebook groups to meet people and find activities when I moved abroad, furnish an apartment when I moved back, discover a niche retro gaming community that I adore, share photos and memories with old friends when a high school friend passed away, collect stories and remembrances that were shared for an uncle who died and share those with his elderly, non-tech parents, to name just a few experiences that would be difficult to replicate without Facebook. I don't like Facebook, but I can't deny the value it has added to my life.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    This is always the response. But I would say ask yourself, do you truly need these things? Or are the fleeting superficial connections that you maintain through social media simply distracting you from seeking truly meaningful interactions, and substituting an artificial (although comforting) facade in its' place? If you truly care about someone, you will call and talk to them. Or orient your life in a way that facilitates that relationship. Otherwise what you are doing is tantamount to slacktivism.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ramesh31 5y ago
As someone who's recovered from multiple substance addictions in the past, it is so painfully obvious when I see social media addicts. It's literally the exact same behavior. The compulsion, the lack of awareness, the ignoring of friends and loved ones while mindlessly scrolling; it's all there. Social addiction is even more sinister because the feedback loop is scientifically optimized in a way no substance could ever match, and it feeds the most base primal need that humans have which is status and recognition. It's more powerful than even hunger. I don't know how we can possibly get away from this.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure there are substances that can match whatever addictive qualities you get from reading a screen. My best friend from high school died while detoxing from alcohol. I'm reasonably sure social media withdrawal is not physically dangerous.
- haolez 5y ago
  No substance could ever match? More powerful than hunger? I strongly challenge that.
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    >No substance could ever match? If you plot the area under the curve of addictive behavior engaged in over a lifetime, absolutely. People can quit substance addictions. You know that your addiction is harming you and actively destroying your life while you are engaged in it. Those feelings eventually lead most people to quit if they don't die. But social addiction is different. It feels like you're actually doing something useful and good, while it rots away your agency and sense of self. You become a mindless scroller whose tastes, preferences, ideologies, and overall cultural milieu become entirely mediated through engagement algorithms without you ever being aware of it.
  - zepto 5y ago
    It’s a pretty reasonable hypothesis. Social drives are innate and are likely at least as powerful the drive for food, and may be prioritized higher.
captainmuon 5y ago
Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore. It used to be addictive, before social media, when it was a social network. You were interacting with real people, you could meet new people, "stalk" people you know IRL, share stuff about yourself or find out stuff about others. You would try to find your crush on FB and check see if you have common acquaintances. And you would obsessively watch who looks at your page and who likes your posts. The thing that made it addictive were the actual human interactions that people crave. I wish someone would make a site like that again!
- itake 5y ago
  +1. My news feed is like 90% memes and ads. I have like 3 friends that actually make interesting text posts that foster discussions. Everything else is a waste cognitive energy.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    I Facebook for support forums for autoimmune conditions. It is drastically better then Reddit for finding answers or suggestions. Every question gets dozens of answers many of which are very insightful and useful if repetitive. The sort of stuff that doctors don’t like to explain like my bloodwork says this what does that mean and what should I do next. people will have excellent answers.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      how can you be sure that they're good answers?
      - whatshisface 5y ago
        I'm not in any Facebook groups but as a general principle it's a lot easier to verify a true claim than it is to come up with a true claim from nothing.
      - treeman79 5y ago
ewzimm 5y ago
Does anyone else find it hard to personally connect with the well-researched claim that people respond with a fight-or-flight response to ideas that challenge their core beliefs? I've always found ideas to be more interesting the more they challenge my core beliefs. This is true of math and science, but especially true of things like religion. I remember how wonderful it was as a teenager to find challenges to the ideas I was raised with, debating my positions with people online, and appreciating losing debates and having my mind opened to new ideas.
- htrp 5y ago
  Public key encryption, especially PGP, is useless in a modern computing context. Windows has solved almost all identity management issues for the end-user base. (did that trigger an emotional response?? It bothered me to write it)
  - mjevans 5y ago
    Sadly, I agree with the first half; for normal end users anyway. (Open)PGP / GNUpg are uselessly cumbersome, slow to adapt standards, useful tools that are ill-suited to the needs of most end users and have horrifically bad UI. The second half is total bunk though, and I'd like to hear how you think that's possibly the case. Maybe there's an angle I'm missing since I don't use that platform for those things. I suspect it was just made up to see what the reactions were.
    - htrp 5y ago
      I took two of the most awful things that bother me about general purpose computing (and likely the larger HN community) and typed them in to see if that would trigger an emotional response. My heart rate actually jumped 15 bpm writing the second statement.
  - ewzimm 5y ago
    That's a great one, and it hits close to home. I'm a huge believer of libre software. I'm typing this response in the vim-based text editor of w3m inside a Terminology terminal on dwm. Just today I fully moved the business I manage off the StatusNet/GNU Social network plus OwnCloud which I've run for the last decade to Microsoft Teams because using AzureAD and Office365 was more efficient for everyone. I haven't changed my beliefs, but I appreciate the best solutions wherever I can find them. If a better option comes along, I'll gladly take it!
ramoz 5y ago
The author who wrote this has tweeted, on average, 1-2x a day for 10 years. https://twitter.com/jaronschneider https://twitter.com/jaronschneider Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society (an information/propagation architecture that exploits how people process information, imo). For me, Facebook is nothing more than a hometown forum. I havent logged on in months.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  >"Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society" Absolutely. Not only are the people on Twitter much more toxic, the trending feed is way more prone to manipulation and influence campaigns. If I don't know someone directly on Facebook, I'm probably never going to see their stupid hot-takes. No such separation on Twitter. Also, whenever I scroll through Facebook, more than half the posts are advertisements anyways. It rarely shows me anything of value from my friends and somehow fixates on the same dozen people. Oddly, I was never even very friendly with those dozen in real life. People say Facebook is dangerous because people fall into a loop of following content they already like and falling into grouptthink. Firstly, how in the world does not apply more strongly with Twitter? Second, on Twitter it is possible to bombard non-followers with repeated, biased, and motivated messaging. I think this is far more insidious because it creates a false sense of consensus and you can condition people to react a certain way with repeated messaging. And, these users don't even need to actively follow the influencers' accounts. Edit: I don't even follow people like "Brooklyn Dad, Defiant!", "Duty to Warn", or "Palmer Report", yet I am always seeing content from these paid influencers whenever I click on a trending topic. So imagine if you're not a partisan person and you consistently keep seeing messages from these kinds of accounts. Chances are, eventually, some of their tweets are going to influence how you think and give you a biased view of things.
  - npunt 5y ago
    I wouldn't take your personal experience on Facebook to be universal. Being a public social network, Twitter's toxicity and distortions are much more visible than Facebook's, and the user experience is far less varied because of common touchpoints like Trending Topics and celebrity posters. Facebook is a far more unique experience per user, so personal experience isn't a great way to understand others experience. A lot of Facebook's problems are related to the network you've formed, on Pages you have to follow, or in private Groups. Facebook also serves far more people and is ubiquitous and worldwide in a way that Twitter just is not. That's why you can't really rely on your own judgment of the product and sort of have to fly on instruments (population level data) to understand it. This is also why it's critical to have researchers have access to that data to understand what is going on.
smsm42 5y ago
I find the premise ridiculous. I mean yes, there are people who are addicted to it. There are people who are addicted to lots of things, from playing video games to climbing ice-covered mountains. But the idea that it's harder to quit facebook than to get rid of, say, opioid dependency - which literally rewires your body's biochemistry - sounds like complete BS. Of course, if your life is so empty you have nothing to do but browse facebook, sure it's hard to quit, but it's not because of the strength of the addiction, it's because of the weakness of the alternative. I'm sure if you cut off that person's internet access and threw their phone into a lake, they'd be cured pretty soon.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I don't disagree with you, but I felt the need to point out the positive feedback loop in the scenario you laid out, that is, the more time you use Facebook the less you spend in your real life and so the alternative becomes weaker even if it was strong when you started. People who use Facebook compulsively didn't start out with no friends and family, if they had they'd have had no reason to create an account on the first place.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    Well, yes, but that's true with pretty much everything. If you're addicted to reading Clancy novels, you spend more time reading Clancy novels and less time talking to friends, therefore Clancy novels are more addictive than heroin. Sounds ridiculous, right? Yes, there's a positive feedback dynamic in any addiction, every basic text on it mentions it. But that's no reason to jump to "most people never would be able to get rid of the habit". This dynamic can be overturned, and there are many tools to do it, and in this particular case it's easy - you body won't disintegrate and you would not feel like armies of Hell descended on you to torture you if you don't use facebook for a week.
- gotostatement 5y ago
  This has the same energy as the cigarette lobbyist in congress who talked about how smoking lettuce has the same health effects as smoking tobacco
kmetan 5y ago
OT: I have quit FB more then 5 years ago, but every time I see a post like this I fear that I am still addicted. Not to FB but to HN...
newaccount2021 5y ago
If you can be free to be addicted to alcohol, weed, or cheeseburgers...then you should also be free to be addicted to junk data
vishnugupta 5y ago
What I noticed about my son’s peer group is that FB just doesn’t occupy their mind share. It’s mostly Roblox, Minecraft, Netflix, YouTube or some other game. FB may well be an addictive space now but I suspect its growth has just about peaked. I keep hearing kids say that FB is something adults use and hence isn’t cool or trendy.
- svachalek 5y ago
  Those sound like pretty young kids. Teens are more actively seeking socialization, but they also gravitate to places adults aren't. Unfortunately it doesn't sound like the new generation of sites like Tiktok is any less insidious.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Among millenials at least in my experience it seems like once parents joined fb it had a strong quieting effect almost instantly.
- suzzer99 5y ago
  Unfortunately youtube is just as bad or worse than Facebook for leading people down extremism rabbit holes.
alchemyromcom 5y ago
I personally found Facebook hard to quit, but not entirely impossible. I would compare it to giving up cigarettes: not easy, but I got through it. I am coming to terms with the fact that I have have a very serious and damaging internet addiction, however. Like many serious addictions, there's a lot of shame attached to my real addiction, which is 4chan. 4chan is like being addicted to heroin. Every day is a battle to look away from the train wreck, and so far I haven't been able to overcome this addiction in any meaningful way. What's interesting is that the site doesn't use any of the scandalous techniques that facebook is currently getting heat for, yet it has a grip on me that's basically ruined my life as much as a crack addiction could ruin a person's life. It's so bad that I've spent many years of my life living in very close proximity to hard drug users, because of the poverty my addiction has caused me. So, I guess what I'm getting at is we might have a bigger problem than just facebook, or at least I do.
- robocat 5y ago
  Creating a 4chan support group for ex-users would be very challenging. How many other 4chan addicts do you know in person?
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Maybe just internet addiction then? Broaden the tent.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ryanianian 5y ago
  This got dark fast. Any behavior that is getting in the way of daily life is an addiction. Doesn't have to be drugs or gambling. Therapists have extensive training in coaching patients out of these behaviors or at least better understanding them. I hope you can find the help you need.
- thegjp210 5y ago
  Would you mind unpacking what you see as your addiction to 4chan? Are there specific boards you frequent? As an infrequent reader of /fit/ and /biz/, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around your experience.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Easy. It became so packed with fake posts and paid-for crap that I got bored and quit oh, years ago.
azta6521 5y ago
Did not even noticed it was down. I think the problem are the people - Zuck just making bank on the weak.
xtartupsHQ 5y ago
It's been 6years since I actively used Facebook. But they acquired everything that I'm addicted to.
game_the0ry 5y ago
Facebook is like vendor lock in for human social interactions and emotions. That's probably why Zuckerberg tries to acquire competitors - trying to lock in your behavior and then sell it to the highest bidder. Makes sense when you think about it. When I suggest people delete FB apps from their phones, they start writhing uncomfortably, and try to justify not doing so by making some half-ass claim that their social life will suffer if they did. Its the same response I would expect from someone who is a moderate alcoholic and is told to drink less wine during the week. The addiction is obvious. My experience after deleting FB apps from my phone - social life changed for the better and I feel less anxiety. It turns out, most of my FB "friends" weren't really my friends. And I can still check FB / Insta via web if I wanted to. Added bonus - FB can't track me as well. FB will do what FB does - try to steal as much data and attention and sell it to the highest bidder. But you can only blame them so much. Collectively, its on people to change and take responsibility if they feel they have grievances related to FB. Still, I have hope - awareness for social media's downside effects is only increasing. Ms. Haugen's testimony and the Social Dilemma documentary demonstrate that.
djoldman 5y ago
The uproar over and magnitude of digital ink spent on Facebook is interesting. This uproar seems to persist even if the discussion is restricted to Americans who are adults and not using Facebook for a commercial purpose (i.e. the use is for amusement or in free time). It seems to be a disconnect from the generally pro-free speech, pro-personal liberty/accountability tone of HN. Are HN'ers calling for regulating social media companies because of toxic/manipulative/addictive free content served to adults? If so, who gets to decide? This discussion is separate from the monopoly power, anti-competitive, anti-democracy angles, which are discussions all their own.
- hairofadog 5y ago
  Firstly, from my point of view they're already heavily censoring content via their algorithm. Facebook hides posts that decrease engagement and amplifies posts that increase engagement. If the argument for absolute free speech is that misinformation should be fought with information (meaning, if some folks are telling people to drink bleach as a cure for covid, the remedy is to tell those same people not to drink bleach, and let the people decide for themselves), that's impossible what with Facebooks algorithmic censorship. It's nearly impossible to reach those people, and it's not even possible to even hear what argument they're receiving in order to rebut. Secondly, in terms of liberty, Facebook is a company doing what they feel they need to do. What course of action, aside from government intervention, would prevent them from removing posts they thought were harmful? What would be the threshold for the government to intervene in a web service's moderation policy?
- bink 5y ago
  If the platform is controlling what you see or interact with based on opaque algorithms does that really still qualify as free speech?
thomasfl 5y ago
I have been just as addicted to Hacker News as I have been addicted to Facebook. Since I discovered this site in 2007, it has at times been a daily routine to come here. Of course you don't spend as much time on HN as on FB. It only takes a few seconds to scroll to the end on HN.
TheBozzCL 5y ago
You know what worked for me to get rid of Facebook? I turned it into a chore and eventually broke it. When I deleted my old account and created a new one a few years ago, I decided to run a little experiment: I started hiding everything that was not posted directly by friends. "[unknown person] posted on [friend]'s wall"? Hide [unknown person]. "[friend] liked a post by [some page]"? I hid that page. A friend shared a post by someone or from a page? You bet I hid those too. And the same for groups, events and so forth. I did that a little bit every day, for 3 years, until Facebook became pretty much barren. My friends only really post a handful of things a day and the rest is just cruft. Around that time I also discovered that Facebook started exposing who had uploaded your contact info as part of a marketing list... so I started leaving negative reviews and blocking those pages. Does this sound like a total bore and a chore? Yes, yes it was. I think I got it going for so long mostly out of spite for the platform. Eventually, it got so bad that it started literally breaking Facebook for me. Sometimes no posts would load at all. Eventually, some of the hiding options stopped working! After a year or so, the experience got so janky and unrewarding I just deleted my account. I took the chance to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp as well, since this was around the time where the latter started pushing for more telemetry. I got most of my closer friends to jump on Telegram and Signal. I do miss Facebook a bit, in that it's become harder to keep up with some people that don't use other platforms... but not too much. I'm setting up a blog for myself to share whatever I want to write, my tech tutorials and maybe set up a photo gallery.
btheshoe 5y ago
It's not just Facebook, it's social media in general. More precisely, it's infinite scroll, which has become a ubiquitous design decision across social media. I recently finally succeeded in developing a healthy relationship to social media, and it involved disabling infinite scroll where I could (using Hackernews, moving to old Reddit) and quitting the social media sites where I couldn't (mostly Youtube). I'm scared to touch Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter because the infinite scroll mechanism is so addictive.
- barbs 5y ago
  I agree with that. I still use Facebook and Youtube, but I disable the News Feed and YouTube recommendations/home page using browser plugins.
Waterluvian 5y ago
I want to thank my insufferable American aunt who did nothing but spin every post and comment into being about her. Made it very easy to quit about eight years ago. Twitter is trickier. I actually enjoy the discourse (once I figured out how to filter the loud angry idiots).
Mikeb85 5y ago
I used to think so, now I'm living a more nomadic life. It's a convenient way to text and call people when you don't have a set phone number.
m1117 5y ago
At least it's not as bad as opioids, actual smoking, gun violence and sugar. Real problems that are neglected in America.
NoPicklez 5y ago
"Most may never be able to quit" I completely doubt that...
frabjoused 5y ago
I have no interest in supporting Facebook, but this article takes a bunch of generals ideas and opinions and states them as fact with little attribution in the context of each statement.
ypcx 5y ago
That "Facebook" we always speak of is never the same thing for everyone. Every Page "like", every "friendship", will change what one sees in their social bubble. I, for one, am glad that my social bubble is utterly boring and un-engaging, and my level of engagement with Facebook is inversely proportional to my engagement/passion in life as such.
ldehaan 5y ago
I quit Facebook around 6 years ago and it was So easy. Facebook is trash, the ui is trash, I mean it's ridiculous, and that was 6 years ago. I can't imagine how bad the ui is now, but it gives me a headache to try. I can only imagine it must be likes, I've rarely gotten likes on any platform. I assume it is because I am writing what I can only assume is gibberish to others. This simple fact stopped me from being addicted. Be less likeable and quitting social media is super easy. Just tell the truth, that seems to work great at reducing likes.
iammisc 5y ago
Do you know what should be illegal? The way facebook does account deletion. When you 'delete' your account, you actually put it into a special state for 30 days. If you log in, even accidentally, during those 30 days, the cancellation is canceled. So, if like most Facebook addicts (as I was), you had the habit of typing 'facebook.com' every 30 minutes or so, it would undo your facebook deletion request. The proper thing to do is to either delete the account immediately (although I understand why maybe losing all your data is a bad idea), or, get rid of the automatic reinstatement and require users to go through a separate process to reclaim their accounts before data purging. Facebook knows that by operating with this cancellation scheme, they can basically prevent cancellations of the addicted, since moments of clarity when someone requests deletion are soon clouded by moments of habit when someone types in 'facebook.com' to satisfy the itch.
sigstoat 5y ago
facebook helped me stop visiting, by insisting on showing me absolutely everything from one acquaintance (who is a fine person), all the dog photos from another friend, and effectively nothing else. no idea what sort of failure mechanism that was, but it made things really boring. i’ve still got my account, there’s just no point. i know what i’ll see already.
milesward 5y ago
bull, i closed my account last night. not tough.
boringg 5y ago
Instagram, maybe. Original Facebook? Easy to go cold turkey, tough to fully delete account though… it’s like deleting your contact list.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ggm 5y ago
Addiction is a complex subject. Personally, I think FB/Social engagement is habituation, but if somebody shows me there is a persisting dopamine/oxy rush, and its affecting neurotransmitters such that when you don't do it, you feel down, I might change my mind. "addiction" is this decades "Schizophrenia" or "bipolar" being misapplied, when it has specific meaning. I should of course add, not a doctor, not a clinical psychologist. Maybe habituation and addiction are closer than I think.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
I think “most” is a little exaggerated. Most people I know rarely post anything or when they do it’s actually useful. Same for Twitter. I don’t know anybody who posts a lot or gets into flame wars.
khazhoux 5y ago
For everyone here who --like me-- has never bought into Facebook, and never gotten hooked on it, congratulations. We are free of the Facebook dopamine dispenser, unlike our poor friends and family. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go refresh the HN front page for the 10th time today, and after checking how many upvotes I got on my latest comments, don't mind if I jump back over to reddit for a while, and then back to watching the Larry David clips that YouTube is sending my way.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  You want this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-demetricator/dihffdmjkpohpejghlapggoiieifikeo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-demetr... It removes comment/upvote numbers from Hacker News and makes it far less able to exploit human psychological loopholes related to numbers.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  My girlfriend calls it "Slacker News" because I only come here when I'm slacking off.
  - civilized 5y ago
    She's a keeper.
    - andresgaitan 5y ago
      Lol
- btown 5y ago
  Can you imagine if Facebook had like karma? Global GDP would almost immediately take a nosedive!
  - KingMachiavelli 5y ago
    It basically does since it has likes/reactions for posts. Except it's worth because the only likes/reactions that matter are the ones people will see today which makes it seam like getting 500 or even 5000 likes per post is a totally normal 'goal'. In comparison HN, the number of possible karma per post is pretty much an equal playing field (save for a few recognizable accounts).
civilized 5y ago
Equally true if you replace "Facebook" with "online media". They optimize their articles and headlines for virality, including this one, just as aggressively as FB optimizes its algorithms. They're just two different parts of the same electronic drug-pushing machine. Give your attention and care and trust to the goals and people in your life that are worthy of it.
m0zg 5y ago
Instagram is actually much worse. FB is not super addictive, at least it wasn't for me. But IG is, and it very clearly has been _designed_ to be that way. It took some effort for me to get off it, and my wife is unable to kick the habit even after I demonstrated to her _with data_ that her Instagram browsing is now a full blown part-time job, and that time could be put to a much better use. TikTok, FWIW, is even more addictive than that, on top of effectively being foreign intelligence spyware. This is being done deliberately much for the same reasons Big Tobacco added stuff to tobacco to make people buy more cigarettes. There are basically two benefits to social media, in my view: 1. It de-centralizes narrative peddling from just 5 or so people who own all of the media to a much greater number, so it gets harder to "make people believe in absurdities to get them to commit atrocities". I'm sure someone will argue the opposite, but the fact is, if FB existed in early 00s, NYT would not be able to sell us the Iraq war. Ms. Haugen is arguing that the 5 people should regain that capability. I disagree with this very strongly. I'd rather have disinformation from multiple sides rather than from just one - easier to read between the lines that way. 2. It lets families and circles of friends communicate a bit more effectively than, say, an instant messenger would. I think the trend there is actually towards messengers - my friends worldwide basically have our own "feed" in Signal which we do not share with anyone else, and from which messages disappear after 4 weeks. Zuck clearly saw this trend much earlier than most people, hence the acquisition of WhatsApp for an eye popping amount of money. IG / TikTok are borderline useless in either of those things. They just drive jealousy, depression and mental illness in people since no matter how well off you are your life won't be as exciting as the collage that consists of the best 30 seconds of someone's year. It basically looks like your life sucks and everyone else's doesn't, even though it could very well be the other way around IRL, and things intrinsically seem that way to nearly everyone who uses the product. As a side note I'm very disappointed that Petapixel chose to participate in what is an obvious and crude political hatchet job.
hdndkdb 5y ago
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AzzieElbab 5y ago
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tick_tock_tick 5y ago
I think it's becoming a more and more accepted that some subset of the population just can't help themselves the question is what do we do with them? A second internet with permeated child safety controls?
qq4 5y ago
I never could understand what was addictive. I kept my account for a few years because I used the chat and posted art my friends and family would enjoy. When I got a smartphone I quit the platform since I could do that stuff on my phone's messaging app. Only thing that seems appealing to me now is the marketplace versus Craigslist.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
I don't find any particular service difficult to quit, but its pretty much impossible to never be on some sort of dopamine grinder on some level. Video games are a nice escape hatch in this way. If you pivot to a game, and then beat the game, there's a moment of nothingness where you have nothing gripping your attention constantly. Or at least that's my experience.
whyihowi 5y ago
I try to use HN or Reddit or whatever on occasion, but I never get any points to speak of, never feel like part of a community in the slightest, and... whenever I see something that I want to comment on, it'll be from 19 hours ago, or three days ago. And if you don't get there in the first two hours by hanging out there ALL DAY LONG, no one will ever know you exist. But I somehow can't bear to hang out all day long in hope of something coming along that I have anything I wish to speak my piece on. Edit: I see that I got distracted in my thinking based on how everyone was talking about HN addiction, etc. and didn't even mention the topic, Facebook. But I've never had an account. So.
pcmoney 5y ago
I am sorry but there is no way that that lack luster product is half as addictive as porn let alone opiods. All of our first hand experiences disprove the narrative. Anyone here helplessly addicted? Sure a couple people might have issues but treating it like digital cocaine is a bit much.
Woodi 5y ago
Addicion or not, still something in communication domain we needed - messages that are a bit more permmament then sms's and IM. But yea, scroll of ignoring is a brain cancer and time waster. HN looks similiar, but for sure it contains Usenet like quality of content, usually. But maybe in last year or two day to day links are less fresh... And, mandatory :> I logged off FB years ago and wish it disappear from Inet for good !!
thedailymail 5y ago
I joined in 2011 and hard--deleted my account in 2012. I was working on public critiques of a well-funded scam industry at at the time, and concerned about peopple using FB to harrass my family. But I was also inspired to leave by a quick series of unilateral anti-user changes to TOS implemented with no warning or opt out by Br'er Zuck et al. I still use some surveillance media platforms for news aggregation and hobby purposes, but the whole FB ecosystem is dead to me and I feel fine
stillbourne 5y ago
It was really hard to quit for me for sure. Near the end I kept telling my friends it feels like posting to FB is just slapping the feeder button in a rat cage, or that I feel like I'm suffering for outrage burnout. I quit just before the lead up to the 2016 election because my feed was becoming a warzone and it was really upsetting. I didn't like seeing family who I loved turning into raging assholes. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made but in some ways it was almost like when I was trying to quit smoking. I'd go away for a week and come back, tell myself I quit again and come back again in one to two week cycles. The only thing that got me to finally leave was backing up all my account assets and actually deleting it. I've never looked back. I feel like I made the right choice especially seeing things like /r/hermancainaward and seeing how polarizing the effects of social media are still accelerating discourse. I think the worse thing is seeing dialogue by meme becoming the most prevalent method of sharing ideas. Taking a complex idea shaving it down to 5 to 10 words with funny image in the background is not the way to have an argument, changes no minds, and seems to have hypnotized entire demographics into ideological mania.
2snakes 5y ago
I'm not sure that it actually is dopamine addiction. Wouldn't we need to have some sort of brain assay to say that it is? There is another chemical though, which does not have as deleterious effects as dopamine, and that's oxytocin. Oxytocin, if I recall correctly, doesn't have the boom-bust cycles (ups and downs), it's just a free glowing high that may have source in social relationships.
beders 5y ago
The issue is not Facebook. The issue is being equipped to handle information forwarded by your FB friends. Skeptical thinking, the impulse to distrust anecdotes first, the impulse to double check articles by using other news sources: It's a skill that should be taught to kids early. I enjoy Facebook to read about what my extended friends and family are doing. I'm ok with FB showing me ads, even personalized ads, if that is what it takes to use this free service.

321 points by thg 5y ago

I replaced my Facebook addiction with HN. Much better here and I learn useful things during procrastinating.

I disagree. If someone provided a simple service for friends and families to share photos and updates, it's possible Facebook could be disrupted. I have no evidence to back up my claim, but I think those are the only things people truly care about. It is the only thing I miss after deleting it two years ago. I certainly don't miss Messenger, the Feed, or news.

buildsjets 5y ago
You mean something like Cluster? Our family has used it for years. https://cluster.co/ https://cluster.co/

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

Imagine if nicotine had network effects (edit: I mean as strong network effects as fb). You can't quit unless all your friends do too. I hear some alcoholics have a similar challenge when their social life revolves around drinking with peer pressure not to abstain.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
>Imagine if nicotine had network effects. You can't quit unless all your friends do too. As a former smoker, it took me moving from an office full of smokers to an office where I was the only smoker to finally motivate me to quit for good. I tapered down over about a year with a vape though, and I think that almost has an anti-network effect in that you kind of look like a bellend!
- ugjka 5y ago
  Nicotine patches and Wellbutrin; I can be around 100 smokers and not give a shit
speedybird 5y ago
My father picked up smoking when he joined the Navy so that he could participate in the smoke breaks. Fortunately he managed to quit when he got out. I wager many started smoking for the same reason, and never quit.
tombert 5y ago
While it was fortunately never a problem for me (I've never really drank a lot), when I did business travel for a living, it was pretty common to go to bars after work and expense some drinks to the company (the CEO knew about this, we weren't breaking rules). I remember thinking that if I were an alcoholic, this would either be the best job in the world or the worst job in the world, depending on your perspective. I can't imagine how much harder it would be to actually quick full-blown alcoholism if all the booze is free. Obviously you were allowed to just buy a soda or seltzer or something, and that's usually what I did, but I could totally see it being ten times harder to quit when all your drinks are comped and all your peers are drinking around you.
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Me stopping drinking ruined my career. I was unable to compete in the deep dark of late night initiation/boozing ceremonies that still drive most major business deals in certain verticals. When you’ve puked next to a ceo, they take your calls.
nonameiguess 5y ago
It does. It's pretty common for friends groups to grow around everyone at a school, a dorm, an office, that take smoke breaks together.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  True story: I once got a major promotion because the boss was a smoker and he overheard me talking about coding - "oh, you can code?"

acoye 5y ago

I quitted 8 years ago, banned in my personal DNS, never looked back. I use private chat apps to replace it, and full disclosure I enjoy from time to time loosing some time on twitter. INT-P speaking, this may be helping me.

twistedpair 5y ago

Phew, managed to quit FB in 2009.

donw 5y ago

I disconnected from nearly all social media about four years ago, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I did not even notice the recent Facebook outage in my daily life, and wouldn’t have even been aware of it without HN.

throwaway123x2 5y ago
I noticed right away because whatsapp went down. Pretty much all my social media is on whatsapp now.
sibeliuss 5y ago
Same here. It's been glorious getting all of that wasted time back. (To say nothing of the weird, latent background depression that suddenly vanished when I deleted said accounts.)
standardUser 5y ago
In the past several years I was able to leverage Facebook groups to meet people and find activities when I moved abroad, furnish an apartment when I moved back, discover a niche retro gaming community that I adore, share photos and memories with old friends when a high school friend passed away, collect stories and remembrances that were shared for an uncle who died and share those with his elderly, non-tech parents, to name just a few experiences that would be difficult to replicate without Facebook. I don't like Facebook, but I can't deny the value it has added to my life.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ramesh31 5y ago
  This is always the response. But I would say ask yourself, do you truly need these things? Or are the fleeting superficial connections that you maintain through social media simply distracting you from seeking truly meaningful interactions, and substituting an artificial (although comforting) facade in its' place? If you truly care about someone, you will call and talk to them. Or orient your life in a way that facilitates that relationship. Otherwise what you are doing is tantamount to slacktivism.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ramesh31 5y ago

As someone who's recovered from multiple substance addictions in the past, it is so painfully obvious when I see social media addicts. It's literally the exact same behavior. The compulsion, the lack of awareness, the ignoring of friends and loved ones while mindlessly scrolling; it's all there. Social addiction is even more sinister because the feedback loop is scientifically optimized in a way no substance could ever match, and it feeds the most base primal need that humans have which is status and recognition. It's more powerful than even hunger. I don't know how we can possibly get away from this.

nonameiguess 5y ago
I'm pretty sure there are substances that can match whatever addictive qualities you get from reading a screen. My best friend from high school died while detoxing from alcohol. I'm reasonably sure social media withdrawal is not physically dangerous.
haolez 5y ago
No substance could ever match? More powerful than hunger? I strongly challenge that.
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >No substance could ever match? If you plot the area under the curve of addictive behavior engaged in over a lifetime, absolutely. People can quit substance addictions. You know that your addiction is harming you and actively destroying your life while you are engaged in it. Those feelings eventually lead most people to quit if they don't die. But social addiction is different. It feels like you're actually doing something useful and good, while it rots away your agency and sense of self. You become a mindless scroller whose tastes, preferences, ideologies, and overall cultural milieu become entirely mediated through engagement algorithms without you ever being aware of it.
- zepto 5y ago
  It’s a pretty reasonable hypothesis. Social drives are innate and are likely at least as powerful the drive for food, and may be prioritized higher.

captainmuon 5y ago

Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore. It used to be addictive, before social media, when it was a social network. You were interacting with real people, you could meet new people, "stalk" people you know IRL, share stuff about yourself or find out stuff about others. You would try to find your crush on FB and check see if you have common acquaintances. And you would obsessively watch who looks at your page and who likes your posts. The thing that made it addictive were the actual human interactions that people crave. I wish someone would make a site like that again!

itake 5y ago
+1. My news feed is like 90% memes and ads. I have like 3 friends that actually make interesting text posts that foster discussions. Everything else is a waste cognitive energy.
- treeman79 5y ago
  I Facebook for support forums for autoimmune conditions. It is drastically better then Reddit for finding answers or suggestions. Every question gets dozens of answers many of which are very insightful and useful if repetitive. The sort of stuff that doctors don’t like to explain like my bloodwork says this what does that mean and what should I do next. people will have excellent answers.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    how can you be sure that they're good answers?
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      I'm not in any Facebook groups but as a general principle it's a lot easier to verify a true claim than it is to come up with a true claim from nothing.
    - treeman79 5y ago

ewzimm 5y ago

Does anyone else find it hard to personally connect with the well-researched claim that people respond with a fight-or-flight response to ideas that challenge their core beliefs? I've always found ideas to be more interesting the more they challenge my core beliefs. This is true of math and science, but especially true of things like religion. I remember how wonderful it was as a teenager to find challenges to the ideas I was raised with, debating my positions with people online, and appreciating losing debates and having my mind opened to new ideas.

htrp 5y ago
Public key encryption, especially PGP, is useless in a modern computing context. Windows has solved almost all identity management issues for the end-user base. (did that trigger an emotional response?? It bothered me to write it)
- mjevans 5y ago
  Sadly, I agree with the first half; for normal end users anyway. (Open)PGP / GNUpg are uselessly cumbersome, slow to adapt standards, useful tools that are ill-suited to the needs of most end users and have horrifically bad UI. The second half is total bunk though, and I'd like to hear how you think that's possibly the case. Maybe there's an angle I'm missing since I don't use that platform for those things. I suspect it was just made up to see what the reactions were.
  - htrp 5y ago
    I took two of the most awful things that bother me about general purpose computing (and likely the larger HN community) and typed them in to see if that would trigger an emotional response. My heart rate actually jumped 15 bpm writing the second statement.
- ewzimm 5y ago
  That's a great one, and it hits close to home. I'm a huge believer of libre software. I'm typing this response in the vim-based text editor of w3m inside a Terminology terminal on dwm. Just today I fully moved the business I manage off the StatusNet/GNU Social network plus OwnCloud which I've run for the last decade to Microsoft Teams because using AzureAD and Office365 was more efficient for everyone. I haven't changed my beliefs, but I appreciate the best solutions wherever I can find them. If a better option comes along, I'll gladly take it!

ramoz 5y ago

The author who wrote this has tweeted, on average, 1-2x a day for 10 years. https://twitter.com/jaronschneider https://twitter.com/jaronschneider Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society (an information/propagation architecture that exploits how people process information, imo). For me, Facebook is nothing more than a hometown forum. I havent logged on in months.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
>"Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society" Absolutely. Not only are the people on Twitter much more toxic, the trending feed is way more prone to manipulation and influence campaigns. If I don't know someone directly on Facebook, I'm probably never going to see their stupid hot-takes. No such separation on Twitter. Also, whenever I scroll through Facebook, more than half the posts are advertisements anyways. It rarely shows me anything of value from my friends and somehow fixates on the same dozen people. Oddly, I was never even very friendly with those dozen in real life. People say Facebook is dangerous because people fall into a loop of following content they already like and falling into grouptthink. Firstly, how in the world does not apply more strongly with Twitter? Second, on Twitter it is possible to bombard non-followers with repeated, biased, and motivated messaging. I think this is far more insidious because it creates a false sense of consensus and you can condition people to react a certain way with repeated messaging. And, these users don't even need to actively follow the influencers' accounts. Edit: I don't even follow people like "Brooklyn Dad, Defiant!", "Duty to Warn", or "Palmer Report", yet I am always seeing content from these paid influencers whenever I click on a trending topic. So imagine if you're not a partisan person and you consistently keep seeing messages from these kinds of accounts. Chances are, eventually, some of their tweets are going to influence how you think and give you a biased view of things.
- npunt 5y ago
  I wouldn't take your personal experience on Facebook to be universal. Being a public social network, Twitter's toxicity and distortions are much more visible than Facebook's, and the user experience is far less varied because of common touchpoints like Trending Topics and celebrity posters. Facebook is a far more unique experience per user, so personal experience isn't a great way to understand others experience. A lot of Facebook's problems are related to the network you've formed, on Pages you have to follow, or in private Groups. Facebook also serves far more people and is ubiquitous and worldwide in a way that Twitter just is not. That's why you can't really rely on your own judgment of the product and sort of have to fly on instruments (population level data) to understand it. This is also why it's critical to have researchers have access to that data to understand what is going on.

smsm42 5y ago

I find the premise ridiculous. I mean yes, there are people who are addicted to it. There are people who are addicted to lots of things, from playing video games to climbing ice-covered mountains. But the idea that it's harder to quit facebook than to get rid of, say, opioid dependency - which literally rewires your body's biochemistry - sounds like complete BS. Of course, if your life is so empty you have nothing to do but browse facebook, sure it's hard to quit, but it's not because of the strength of the addiction, it's because of the weakness of the alternative. I'm sure if you cut off that person's internet access and threw their phone into a lake, they'd be cured pretty soon.

betwixthewires 5y ago
I don't disagree with you, but I felt the need to point out the positive feedback loop in the scenario you laid out, that is, the more time you use Facebook the less you spend in your real life and so the alternative becomes weaker even if it was strong when you started. People who use Facebook compulsively didn't start out with no friends and family, if they had they'd have had no reason to create an account on the first place.
- smsm42 5y ago
  Well, yes, but that's true with pretty much everything. If you're addicted to reading Clancy novels, you spend more time reading Clancy novels and less time talking to friends, therefore Clancy novels are more addictive than heroin. Sounds ridiculous, right? Yes, there's a positive feedback dynamic in any addiction, every basic text on it mentions it. But that's no reason to jump to "most people never would be able to get rid of the habit". This dynamic can be overturned, and there are many tools to do it, and in this particular case it's easy - you body won't disintegrate and you would not feel like armies of Hell descended on you to torture you if you don't use facebook for a week.
gotostatement 5y ago
This has the same energy as the cigarette lobbyist in congress who talked about how smoking lettuce has the same health effects as smoking tobacco

kmetan 5y ago

OT: I have quit FB more then 5 years ago, but every time I see a post like this I fear that I am still addicted. Not to FB but to HN...

newaccount2021 5y ago

If you can be free to be addicted to alcohol, weed, or cheeseburgers...then you should also be free to be addicted to junk data

vishnugupta 5y ago

What I noticed about my son’s peer group is that FB just doesn’t occupy their mind share. It’s mostly Roblox, Minecraft, Netflix, YouTube or some other game. FB may well be an addictive space now but I suspect its growth has just about peaked. I keep hearing kids say that FB is something adults use and hence isn’t cool or trendy.

svachalek 5y ago
Those sound like pretty young kids. Teens are more actively seeking socialization, but they also gravitate to places adults aren't. Unfortunately it doesn't sound like the new generation of sites like Tiktok is any less insidious.
- asdff 5y ago
  Among millenials at least in my experience it seems like once parents joined fb it had a strong quieting effect almost instantly.
suzzer99 5y ago
Unfortunately youtube is just as bad or worse than Facebook for leading people down extremism rabbit holes.

alchemyromcom 5y ago

I personally found Facebook hard to quit, but not entirely impossible. I would compare it to giving up cigarettes: not easy, but I got through it. I am coming to terms with the fact that I have have a very serious and damaging internet addiction, however. Like many serious addictions, there's a lot of shame attached to my real addiction, which is 4chan. 4chan is like being addicted to heroin. Every day is a battle to look away from the train wreck, and so far I haven't been able to overcome this addiction in any meaningful way. What's interesting is that the site doesn't use any of the scandalous techniques that facebook is currently getting heat for, yet it has a grip on me that's basically ruined my life as much as a crack addiction could ruin a person's life. It's so bad that I've spent many years of my life living in very close proximity to hard drug users, because of the poverty my addiction has caused me. So, I guess what I'm getting at is we might have a bigger problem than just facebook, or at least I do.

robocat 5y ago
Creating a 4chan support group for ex-users would be very challenging. How many other 4chan addicts do you know in person?
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Maybe just internet addiction then? Broaden the tent.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ryanianian 5y ago
This got dark fast. Any behavior that is getting in the way of daily life is an addiction. Doesn't have to be drugs or gambling. Therapists have extensive training in coaching patients out of these behaviors or at least better understanding them. I hope you can find the help you need.
thegjp210 5y ago
Would you mind unpacking what you see as your addiction to 4chan? Are there specific boards you frequent? As an infrequent reader of /fit/ and /biz/, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around your experience.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Easy. It became so packed with fake posts and paid-for crap that I got bored and quit oh, years ago.

azta6521 5y ago

Did not even noticed it was down. I think the problem are the people - Zuck just making bank on the weak.

xtartupsHQ 5y ago

It's been 6years since I actively used Facebook. But they acquired everything that I'm addicted to.

game_the0ry 5y ago

Facebook is like vendor lock in for human social interactions and emotions. That's probably why Zuckerberg tries to acquire competitors - trying to lock in your behavior and then sell it to the highest bidder. Makes sense when you think about it. When I suggest people delete FB apps from their phones, they start writhing uncomfortably, and try to justify not doing so by making some half-ass claim that their social life will suffer if they did. Its the same response I would expect from someone who is a moderate alcoholic and is told to drink less wine during the week. The addiction is obvious. My experience after deleting FB apps from my phone - social life changed for the better and I feel less anxiety. It turns out, most of my FB "friends" weren't really my friends. And I can still check FB / Insta via web if I wanted to. Added bonus - FB can't track me as well. FB will do what FB does - try to steal as much data and attention and sell it to the highest bidder. But you can only blame them so much. Collectively, its on people to change and take responsibility if they feel they have grievances related to FB. Still, I have hope - awareness for social media's downside effects is only increasing. Ms. Haugen's testimony and the Social Dilemma documentary demonstrate that.

djoldman 5y ago

The uproar over and magnitude of digital ink spent on Facebook is interesting. This uproar seems to persist even if the discussion is restricted to Americans who are adults and not using Facebook for a commercial purpose (i.e. the use is for amusement or in free time). It seems to be a disconnect from the generally pro-free speech, pro-personal liberty/accountability tone of HN. Are HN'ers calling for regulating social media companies because of toxic/manipulative/addictive free content served to adults? If so, who gets to decide? This discussion is separate from the monopoly power, anti-competitive, anti-democracy angles, which are discussions all their own.

hairofadog 5y ago
Firstly, from my point of view they're already heavily censoring content via their algorithm. Facebook hides posts that decrease engagement and amplifies posts that increase engagement. If the argument for absolute free speech is that misinformation should be fought with information (meaning, if some folks are telling people to drink bleach as a cure for covid, the remedy is to tell those same people not to drink bleach, and let the people decide for themselves), that's impossible what with Facebooks algorithmic censorship. It's nearly impossible to reach those people, and it's not even possible to even hear what argument they're receiving in order to rebut. Secondly, in terms of liberty, Facebook is a company doing what they feel they need to do. What course of action, aside from government intervention, would prevent them from removing posts they thought were harmful? What would be the threshold for the government to intervene in a web service's moderation policy?
bink 5y ago
If the platform is controlling what you see or interact with based on opaque algorithms does that really still qualify as free speech?

thomasfl 5y ago

I have been just as addicted to Hacker News as I have been addicted to Facebook. Since I discovered this site in 2007, it has at times been a daily routine to come here. Of course you don't spend as much time on HN as on FB. It only takes a few seconds to scroll to the end on HN.

TheBozzCL 5y ago

You know what worked for me to get rid of Facebook? I turned it into a chore and eventually broke it. When I deleted my old account and created a new one a few years ago, I decided to run a little experiment: I started hiding everything that was not posted directly by friends. "[unknown person] posted on [friend]'s wall"? Hide [unknown person]. "[friend] liked a post by [some page]"? I hid that page. A friend shared a post by someone or from a page? You bet I hid those too. And the same for groups, events and so forth. I did that a little bit every day, for 3 years, until Facebook became pretty much barren. My friends only really post a handful of things a day and the rest is just cruft. Around that time I also discovered that Facebook started exposing who had uploaded your contact info as part of a marketing list... so I started leaving negative reviews and blocking those pages. Does this sound like a total bore and a chore? Yes, yes it was. I think I got it going for so long mostly out of spite for the platform. Eventually, it got so bad that it started literally breaking Facebook for me. Sometimes no posts would load at all. Eventually, some of the hiding options stopped working! After a year or so, the experience got so janky and unrewarding I just deleted my account. I took the chance to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp as well, since this was around the time where the latter started pushing for more telemetry. I got most of my closer friends to jump on Telegram and Signal. I do miss Facebook a bit, in that it's become harder to keep up with some people that don't use other platforms... but not too much. I'm setting up a blog for myself to share whatever I want to write, my tech tutorials and maybe set up a photo gallery.

btheshoe 5y ago

It's not just Facebook, it's social media in general. More precisely, it's infinite scroll, which has become a ubiquitous design decision across social media. I recently finally succeeded in developing a healthy relationship to social media, and it involved disabling infinite scroll where I could (using Hackernews, moving to old Reddit) and quitting the social media sites where I couldn't (mostly Youtube). I'm scared to touch Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter because the infinite scroll mechanism is so addictive.

barbs 5y ago
I agree with that. I still use Facebook and Youtube, but I disable the News Feed and YouTube recommendations/home page using browser plugins.

Waterluvian 5y ago

I want to thank my insufferable American aunt who did nothing but spin every post and comment into being about her. Made it very easy to quit about eight years ago. Twitter is trickier. I actually enjoy the discourse (once I figured out how to filter the loud angry idiots).

Mikeb85 5y ago

I used to think so, now I'm living a more nomadic life. It's a convenient way to text and call people when you don't have a set phone number.

m1117 5y ago

At least it's not as bad as opioids, actual smoking, gun violence and sugar. Real problems that are neglected in America.

NoPicklez 5y ago

"Most may never be able to quit" I completely doubt that...

frabjoused 5y ago

I have no interest in supporting Facebook, but this article takes a bunch of generals ideas and opinions and states them as fact with little attribution in the context of each statement.

ypcx 5y ago

That "Facebook" we always speak of is never the same thing for everyone. Every Page "like", every "friendship", will change what one sees in their social bubble. I, for one, am glad that my social bubble is utterly boring and un-engaging, and my level of engagement with Facebook is inversely proportional to my engagement/passion in life as such.

ldehaan 5y ago

I quit Facebook around 6 years ago and it was So easy. Facebook is trash, the ui is trash, I mean it's ridiculous, and that was 6 years ago. I can't imagine how bad the ui is now, but it gives me a headache to try. I can only imagine it must be likes, I've rarely gotten likes on any platform. I assume it is because I am writing what I can only assume is gibberish to others. This simple fact stopped me from being addicted. Be less likeable and quitting social media is super easy. Just tell the truth, that seems to work great at reducing likes.

iammisc 5y ago

Do you know what should be illegal? The way facebook does account deletion. When you 'delete' your account, you actually put it into a special state for 30 days. If you log in, even accidentally, during those 30 days, the cancellation is canceled. So, if like most Facebook addicts (as I was), you had the habit of typing 'facebook.com' every 30 minutes or so, it would undo your facebook deletion request. The proper thing to do is to either delete the account immediately (although I understand why maybe losing all your data is a bad idea), or, get rid of the automatic reinstatement and require users to go through a separate process to reclaim their accounts before data purging. Facebook knows that by operating with this cancellation scheme, they can basically prevent cancellations of the addicted, since moments of clarity when someone requests deletion are soon clouded by moments of habit when someone types in 'facebook.com' to satisfy the itch.

sigstoat 5y ago

facebook helped me stop visiting, by insisting on showing me absolutely everything from one acquaintance (who is a fine person), all the dog photos from another friend, and effectively nothing else. no idea what sort of failure mechanism that was, but it made things really boring. i’ve still got my account, there’s just no point. i know what i’ll see already.

milesward 5y ago

bull, i closed my account last night. not tough.

boringg 5y ago

Instagram, maybe. Original Facebook? Easy to go cold turkey, tough to fully delete account though… it’s like deleting your contact list.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ggm 5y ago

Addiction is a complex subject. Personally, I think FB/Social engagement is habituation, but if somebody shows me there is a persisting dopamine/oxy rush, and its affecting neurotransmitters such that when you don't do it, you feel down, I might change my mind. "addiction" is this decades "Schizophrenia" or "bipolar" being misapplied, when it has specific meaning. I should of course add, not a doctor, not a clinical psychologist. Maybe habituation and addiction are closer than I think.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

I think “most” is a little exaggerated. Most people I know rarely post anything or when they do it’s actually useful. Same for Twitter. I don’t know anybody who posts a lot or gets into flame wars.

khazhoux 5y ago

For everyone here who --like me-- has never bought into Facebook, and never gotten hooked on it, congratulations. We are free of the Facebook dopamine dispenser, unlike our poor friends and family. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go refresh the HN front page for the 10th time today, and after checking how many upvotes I got on my latest comments, don't mind if I jump back over to reddit for a while, and then back to watching the Larry David clips that YouTube is sending my way.

Syonyk 5y ago
You want this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-demetricator/dihffdmjkpohpejghlapggoiieifikeo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-demetr... It removes comment/upvote numbers from Hacker News and makes it far less able to exploit human psychological loopholes related to numbers.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
My girlfriend calls it "Slacker News" because I only come here when I'm slacking off.
- civilized 5y ago
  She's a keeper.
  - andresgaitan 5y ago
    Lol
btown 5y ago
Can you imagine if Facebook had like karma? Global GDP would almost immediately take a nosedive!
- KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  It basically does since it has likes/reactions for posts. Except it's worth because the only likes/reactions that matter are the ones people will see today which makes it seam like getting 500 or even 5000 likes per post is a totally normal 'goal'. In comparison HN, the number of possible karma per post is pretty much an equal playing field (save for a few recognizable accounts).

civilized 5y ago

Equally true if you replace "Facebook" with "online media". They optimize their articles and headlines for virality, including this one, just as aggressively as FB optimizes its algorithms. They're just two different parts of the same electronic drug-pushing machine. Give your attention and care and trust to the goals and people in your life that are worthy of it.

m0zg 5y ago

Instagram is actually much worse. FB is not super addictive, at least it wasn't for me. But IG is, and it very clearly has been _designed_ to be that way. It took some effort for me to get off it, and my wife is unable to kick the habit even after I demonstrated to her _with data_ that her Instagram browsing is now a full blown part-time job, and that time could be put to a much better use. TikTok, FWIW, is even more addictive than that, on top of effectively being foreign intelligence spyware. This is being done deliberately much for the same reasons Big Tobacco added stuff to tobacco to make people buy more cigarettes. There are basically two benefits to social media, in my view: 1. It de-centralizes narrative peddling from just 5 or so people who own all of the media to a much greater number, so it gets harder to "make people believe in absurdities to get them to commit atrocities". I'm sure someone will argue the opposite, but the fact is, if FB existed in early 00s, NYT would not be able to sell us the Iraq war. Ms. Haugen is arguing that the 5 people should regain that capability. I disagree with this very strongly. I'd rather have disinformation from multiple sides rather than from just one - easier to read between the lines that way. 2. It lets families and circles of friends communicate a bit more effectively than, say, an instant messenger would. I think the trend there is actually towards messengers - my friends worldwide basically have our own "feed" in Signal which we do not share with anyone else, and from which messages disappear after 4 weeks. Zuck clearly saw this trend much earlier than most people, hence the acquisition of WhatsApp for an eye popping amount of money. IG / TikTok are borderline useless in either of those things. They just drive jealousy, depression and mental illness in people since no matter how well off you are your life won't be as exciting as the collage that consists of the best 30 seconds of someone's year. It basically looks like your life sucks and everyone else's doesn't, even though it could very well be the other way around IRL, and things intrinsically seem that way to nearly everyone who uses the product. As a side note I'm very disappointed that Petapixel chose to participate in what is an obvious and crude political hatchet job.

hdndkdb 5y ago

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AzzieElbab 5y ago

tick_tock_tick 5y ago

I think it's becoming a more and more accepted that some subset of the population just can't help themselves the question is what do we do with them? A second internet with permeated child safety controls?

qq4 5y ago

I never could understand what was addictive. I kept my account for a few years because I used the chat and posted art my friends and family would enjoy. When I got a smartphone I quit the platform since I could do that stuff on my phone's messaging app. Only thing that seems appealing to me now is the marketplace versus Craigslist.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

I don't find any particular service difficult to quit, but its pretty much impossible to never be on some sort of dopamine grinder on some level. Video games are a nice escape hatch in this way. If you pivot to a game, and then beat the game, there's a moment of nothingness where you have nothing gripping your attention constantly. Or at least that's my experience.

whyihowi 5y ago

I try to use HN or Reddit or whatever on occasion, but I never get any points to speak of, never feel like part of a community in the slightest, and... whenever I see something that I want to comment on, it'll be from 19 hours ago, or three days ago. And if you don't get there in the first two hours by hanging out there ALL DAY LONG, no one will ever know you exist. But I somehow can't bear to hang out all day long in hope of something coming along that I have anything I wish to speak my piece on. Edit: I see that I got distracted in my thinking based on how everyone was talking about HN addiction, etc. and didn't even mention the topic, Facebook. But I've never had an account. So.

pcmoney 5y ago

I am sorry but there is no way that that lack luster product is half as addictive as porn let alone opiods. All of our first hand experiences disprove the narrative. Anyone here helplessly addicted? Sure a couple people might have issues but treating it like digital cocaine is a bit much.

Woodi 5y ago

Addicion or not, still something in communication domain we needed - messages that are a bit more permmament then sms's and IM. But yea, scroll of ignoring is a brain cancer and time waster. HN looks similiar, but for sure it contains Usenet like quality of content, usually. But maybe in last year or two day to day links are less fresh... And, mandatory :> I logged off FB years ago and wish it disappear from Inet for good !!

thedailymail 5y ago

I joined in 2011 and hard--deleted my account in 2012. I was working on public critiques of a well-funded scam industry at at the time, and concerned about peopple using FB to harrass my family. But I was also inspired to leave by a quick series of unilateral anti-user changes to TOS implemented with no warning or opt out by Br'er Zuck et al. I still use some surveillance media platforms for news aggregation and hobby purposes, but the whole FB ecosystem is dead to me and I feel fine

stillbourne 5y ago

It was really hard to quit for me for sure. Near the end I kept telling my friends it feels like posting to FB is just slapping the feeder button in a rat cage, or that I feel like I'm suffering for outrage burnout. I quit just before the lead up to the 2016 election because my feed was becoming a warzone and it was really upsetting. I didn't like seeing family who I loved turning into raging assholes. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made but in some ways it was almost like when I was trying to quit smoking. I'd go away for a week and come back, tell myself I quit again and come back again in one to two week cycles. The only thing that got me to finally leave was backing up all my account assets and actually deleting it. I've never looked back. I feel like I made the right choice especially seeing things like /r/hermancainaward and seeing how polarizing the effects of social media are still accelerating discourse. I think the worse thing is seeing dialogue by meme becoming the most prevalent method of sharing ideas. Taking a complex idea shaving it down to 5 to 10 words with funny image in the background is not the way to have an argument, changes no minds, and seems to have hypnotized entire demographics into ideological mania.

2snakes 5y ago

I'm not sure that it actually is dopamine addiction. Wouldn't we need to have some sort of brain assay to say that it is? There is another chemical though, which does not have as deleterious effects as dopamine, and that's oxytocin. Oxytocin, if I recall correctly, doesn't have the boom-bust cycles (ups and downs), it's just a free glowing high that may have source in social relationships.

beders 5y ago

The issue is not Facebook. The issue is being equipped to handle information forwarded by your FB friends. Skeptical thinking, the impulse to distrust anecdotes first, the impulse to double check articles by using other news sources: It's a skill that should be taught to kids early. I enjoy Facebook to read about what my extended friends and family are doing. I'm ok with FB showing me ads, even personalized ads, if that is what it takes to use this free service.