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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

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
      Because I spent years researching my conditions. A lot of people on the forums have as well. Plus some treatments show up again and again as “this worked for me” For example I was getting up 10x a night to pee for years. Kept seeing post to try aloe Vera freeze dried pills. $$$ Finally tried it. And I slept through the night now. Understanding test is another one. A crap ton of doctors will see a negative test and automatically declare you don’t have X condition even if you have every single symptom. Eventually you learned that a large percentage usually get negatives on that test. That there are alternate test that can be run. But most doctors aren’t even aware they exist. Oh so a lot of the moral and legal support. Imagine having the flu for 30 years And trying to live a normal life. Everyone calling you lazy and a whiner and if you try and do something about it you get labeled as a hypochondriac and it all being dismissed as anxiety. Some diseases take on average seven years or more to get diagnosed because because of these problems; mine took 20 years.
  - KingMachiavelli 5y ago
    Reddit used to be really great for this type of community when subreddits could customize stuff and even have a dedicated Wiki. It's really gone the opposite direction in the last few years. They still can have these things but the tools are literally 10+ years behind.
- gfxgirl 5y ago
  maybe you need to curate your feed? mine is no memes and few ads which I ignore. it's all posts from family and friends . also stopped following friends who I aren't close and friends that post too much
  - amelius 5y ago
    If you unfollow people, Facebook will just fill the gap in your newsfeed with more stupid memes and ads.
  - itake 5y ago
    I certainly could curate my following list more, but that takes too much time. Manually unfollowing ~1.1k is boring. Also, I am in FB groups b/c at one point they were important to me (like looking for housing in SF). I don't exactly want to leave the group b/c I know I will need it later, nor do I want to deal with unfollowing all of the groups I don't are about.
    - nmstoker 5y ago
      Sounds like being the FB equivalent of an IRL hoarder! Why not drop out the groups and rejoin in the unlikely event you really do need them later? Most people I know get by very well with no FB groups at all.
      - itake 5y ago
        I've certainly done left and rejoined before. I worry that Group moderators might not allow me back in (either they stop accepting new members or get annoyed at someone for jumping in and out). Also, there is some friction with joining Groups. Group owners ask filter questions and delay admissions by days. You can "unfollow" groups, but that requires a few clicks. FB groups are the best way for me to find roommate-style housing. "{city|country} expat" Groups help me plan my travels and answer questions. I don't know of other platforms that provide this service for me at low costs.
  - im3w1l 5y ago
    Why would I spend a lot of effort on getting myself addicted?
standardUser 5y ago
I follow a certain set of pages/groups for some hobbies and have muted almost everything else, including almost all people. You can pretty much make a custom feed that way, though the quality will depend on the quality of posts in those groups (which is on average very low). Instagram still sort of works like an actual social network for me. I've found it's actually super important for dating (in my age group/scene/whathaveyou).
betwixthewires 5y ago
You know what, you're right, I never noticed this change, probably because I quit FB years ago. It's just a content aggregator now, there's not much social about it aside from FOMO.
colpabar 5y ago
I deleted my account several years ago and tried to get my girlfriend at the time to do the same thing. She was in favor of the idea, but facebook would show her a bunch of people with a message like "but what about all these people, won't you miss them?" and it did a great job of picking people who she most likely would not have kept in contact with if not for facebook, so she never deleted it. I think FOMO is the main reason most people are still on there, not so much "addiction".
- coliveira 5y ago
  You don't need to delete your account, you just need to delete the app in your phone and the job is done.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Not if you've got a browser...
yosito 5y ago
> I wish someone would make a site like that again! On a technical level, it's not hard. On business level, it's doubtful if there's a compelling enough business model to prevent it from becoming another surveillance capitalism platform. And on a societal level, it seems impossible that living generations will ever trust a platform en masse again enough to achieve such ubiquity.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  I'm convinced that there is a service people will pay for. My idea is that _somebody_ in a social group will want it to happen, and that they can pay for the whole group.
  - yosito 5y ago
    I paid to boost a Discord server for my whole friend group, and they still insist on sticking to the WhatsApp group chat because "we don't want to download another app, everybody already uses WhatsApp".
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Non-profit would be a perfect business model. It isn't like that level of functionality requires a multi $B company to run it.
  - yosito 5y ago
    "Non-profit" is a type of business, but not a business model.
    - wintermutestwin 5y ago
      You are technically correct, but "non-profit" designation opens up the potential for a healthy and positive business model that doesn't rely on the theft of user data.
s5300 5y ago
To my knowledge, it's sort of like a retirement home for old people or those with no real career, especially angry ones. I was in an AT&T store the other day when Facebook went down, dealing with something stupid. I hadn't really touched the internet that day up to that point, blissfully unaware of the Facebook issues. During the last five minutes I was there, in the physical AT&T store, some lady who was in her 50's, or really rough 40's, came in screaming about not being able to get into Facebook on her phone (I presume her only method of internet access) - & also about an uptick of spam calls and texts, I can only hilariously imagine why she's getting them. Not too long after I got home I read about the Facebook outage, and it hit me that was the reason she was in there. The employees also seemed unaware as I could hear them discussing standard diagnostics on her phone. But yeah, that person in middle America had absolutely nothing better going on in life than to drive roughly 10 minutes or more (near all residential areas are far away from this store, fairly rural) because she couldn't get on Facebook for a few hours. She was... very not nice to the employees too.
ben_w 5y ago
What hooks people like us (whatever that means) isn’t necessarily what hooks normal people (ditto). Facebook has a massive training set at its disposal, claiming more monthly active users than humans have lifetime heartbeats. If FB isn’t chronically addictive for normal people with that sample size, then either (0) A/B testing isn’t as capable as we like to think it is, or (1) FB isn’t even trying anymore.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  They don't necessarily need to target normal people, it's possible that over time they have optimized their site to attract those with certain traits that are most profitable.
  - svachalek 5y ago
    This is sadly true. Genuine social interaction is rewarding but not addictive, as evidenced by thousands of years of history. And there's not a lot of ways to profit from it. On the other hand, getting people to come back every day or every hour for messages that compel them to buy things or vote a certain way is priceless to the right bidders.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Hm, could be, if the whales collectively outspend the rest of us collectively.
999900000999 5y ago
I’m in the same boat. I still use it for messenger, but most days I don’t even look at Facebook. You can still meet people in real life, just the other day I asked out a girl at a concert and we got drinks afterwards. That’s much more straightforward than installing 30 apps and chatting with bots. In fact I had a girl offer to add me on Instagram and I just said no. It’s not that serious ( plus typically if she won’t give you her number she doesn’t actually want to date you.) I’ll agree Facebook used to be much better. For example I was( like 10 years ago) in a college group and I actually went out with a girl from that. I think if your in a closed community it can still be fun.
klyrs 5y ago
Herein lies the banality: facebook is boring, but if you're bored, it's better than nothing. I don't begrudge folks using it to pass the time on transit to avoid interacting with the public... but I've witnessed quite a few people scrolling endlessly while half-watching tv, half-participating in face to face interactions, etc. I've fallen into that trap myself, during a period of intense burnout -- my ability to focus or produce dropped to zero, and... gotta get that dopamine.
- i_am_proteus 5y ago
  I'll assert that it's much worse than nothing. "Nothing" isn't bad. Meditate. Let your imagination run wild. Relax. You can't do those things on facebook dot com.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    For people with severe anxiety or depression, meditation can actually aggravate the situation and do significant harm. Letting one's mind run wild in that situation leads to more anxiety, suicide planning, etc. But, I'll amend my statement: facebook is less boring than a blank screen.
    - ferrumfist 5y ago
      That's absurd. There is no scientific basis that would support your assertion. In fact, increased social media activity leads to a higher chance of suffering from depressive episodes. Meditation has been shown to to actually combat symptoms of depression. If you can't sit still with your own thoughts for 60 seconds without spiraling, then you shouldn't even be remotely near social media.
      - klyrs 5y ago
        > That's absurd. There is no scientific basis that would support your assertion. Why are you so confident in that? Have you done your research? I learned that from a licensed psychologist, and know several people who have had severely negative reactions to "mindfulness" training, but it only took 30 seconds to find these two links: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210202-how-mindfulness-can-blunt-your-feelings-and-spike-anxiety https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210202-how-mindfulnes... https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251840-mindfulness-and-meditation-can-worsen-depression-and-anxiety/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251840-mindfulness-and... > If you can't sit still with your own thoughts for 60 seconds without spiraling, then you shouldn't even be remotely near social media. Not exactly disagreeing with you here, but neither is meditation necessarily better. Therapy is probably the best thing, but social media is "free." And, note that I'm not in favor of social media, merely explaining the cost-benefit analysis that people in this hole use. Reasoning from your high horse will result in different cost-benefit analysis, which won't make any sense to the people whose lives you might like to improve.
afavour 5y ago
I feel as though it's impossible for anyone to write a thread on HN about Facebook without someone immediately coming in and saying that Facebook is stupid and they deleted their account years ago. Yeah, me too. But you usually don't have to look beyond your immediate family to find someone that uses Facebook (or at the very least an FB-owned property) a ton. We aren't typical!
- speedybird 5y ago
  If quitting facebook is framed as impossible, then those who want to quit will feel helpless. Posts like the one above are helpful because they tell people that there is hope. You can quit facebook. Should we tell alcoholics that they'll never quit and their plight is hopeless? Or do we amplify the voices of those who succeeded in quitting, in the hopes that others may find inspiration to do the same? I'll do the latter.
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    What we shouldn't do is amplify the voices of people who were never addicted in the first place. That doesn't provide hope, if anything it works to de-legitimize how challenging quitting can be
    - speedybird 5y ago
      My read of captainmuon's comment is that captainmuon once considered themself addicted to facebook.
  - scrapcode 5y ago
    I grew up in "Small Town America" in a large family and was really one of the "few" to ever move away (if any). The "problem" for me is that there really isn't an alternative to Facebook for sharing pictures and videos of my son and family for my close family to be a part of. I could have a personal blog, gallery, etc, but my grandparents that are on facebook (my son's great grandparents) don't get to see how much all of their friends enjoy them as well, etc. In that sense, it's really not so much a problem. It's been an amazing crutch to a sort of depression caused by thoughts such as "my son is lucky enough to have his great grandparents and I'm across the Nation chasing money," etc. I guess I'm one of the ones really stuck in the rut.
jay_kyburz 5y ago
>I wish someone would make a site like that again! I will make a site similar to that. I really want to. I have plan all drawn up for how it will work. Its ad free, but with premium services for those willing to pay. One member of a family or group can pay for everybody. The site is ephemeral, all posts are removed after three months. Its not a place where you store all your photos. Its a site where friends and families share their holidays, their baby photos and birthday invitations. There won't be sharing news. I'm not scared to take on the behemoth, I'm one guy in a home office. I only need a few thousand subscribers to make it worth my while. I've got about 2 years left on my current project, then I'm going to start.
- randycupertino 5y ago
  This actually sounds super cool and I think would fill a void a lot of families/groups are using right now with group texting. Godspeed!
- teflonbungee 5y ago
  Maaaan I wish I could get in on something like this. I’m a noob web dev and I’d love to work on a substantial project with a skilled dev. This sounds like a really cool idea.
ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
I think my wife is addicted, she will pick up her phone to do one thing but first goes to Facebook and scrolls, then she forgets what she was using her phone for. Maybe not addicted but she has a habit of going to Facebook every time she uses her phone.
- cutler 5y ago
  To my partner the internet was down, not Facebook and Instagram. I tried to explain the difference but to no avail.
- root_axis 5y ago
  That doesn't seem at all like addiction to me, that's just a mundane routine. If she had a panic attack when FB went down this week then I think we could say it's an addiction.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Sounds like that Afroman song, to me. "I was gonna clean my room, but then I got high..." If a habitual behavior is bad enough to interrupt somebody's ability to accomplish routine tasks, then it's pretty conclusively an addiction.
    - root_axis 5y ago
      but it's not. the vast vast majority of people spend a few minutes scrolling through fb, the same way people here scroll through HN, it's a totally meaningless time waster.
      - klyrs 5y ago
        When you open your phone to do something other than look at HN, get distracted by HN, and forget why you opened your phone, that's a problem. Scrolling a few minutes here and there isn't the problem.
        5y ago
ljm 5y ago
> Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore You are not 'most people' then
- fsckboy 5y ago
  he wrote a substantive post, the main thrust of which you're not responding to. what he said is how captivating he found facebook before they made a number of changes to it. So he is actually saying he is a part of most people, give what he says some creedence.
meijer 5y ago
Wait... you could see who looks at your page?
devit 5y ago
I think the addicted people still use it like you are describing (as well as looking at the feed).
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"And you would obsessively watch who looks at your page ..." I used a relatively small-scale website with all this functionality before Facebook or the term "social network" existed. However regarding seeing who visits a profile, I do not remember Facebook ever allowed the user to see who was viewing their profile. Today, one can create a "page" (cf. profile) and Facebook lets one pay to promote a page. Facebook gives some very basic metrics on whether the page is getting visits, with less detail than a basic web server log. It might be interesting if Facebook allowed users to see who was accessing their profile because from what I have profiles are routinely being accessed by accounts that the user is not aware of. Facebook might seem "dead" to some folks as they do not see much activity, however there may be regular activity that they cannot see. Their data is being used by Facebook and their profile data is being accessed. Connections are being made. (As in connecting the user to other people, locations, institutions, etc.)
Lamad123 5y ago
I use messenger only on desktop but it is painfully slow.. Even message notifications load after many seconds
karaterobot 5y ago
People talk about how boring Facebook is, but two days ago, when it went down for a few hours, it was all anybody talked about. There were multiple "Facebook is down!" threads here on HN, including a 1200+ comment thread about it. You can say "well, that was just morbid curiosity..." but then I'd ask for a pointer to another equally urgent response to an event. Any event. If all the smart kids find Facebook boring and not-at-all addictive then why did it suck up all the oxygen on the internet when it disappeared for a couple hours?
- speedybird 5y ago
  A FAANG going down for hours is interesting even to people who don't associate with that company. You're trying to frame this as a contradiction, but it isn't.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  There's a difference between Facebook, Inc (the company whose services were down) and facebook.com (the website that this article is about, which people are saying is "over"). It wasn't just Facebook (the social media website) that was down, though; it was Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down (if you're keeping score, that's 3-4 of the top 10 apps for both iOS and Android, depending on how you count Messenger), a large number of services that (surprisingly to many people) turned out to depend on Facebook's services, and a general firestorm of DNS DDOS's from services trying to access Facebook.com. That turns into a large portion of the internet behaving badly, not even counting that Whatsapp is the commons on which much of the non-US world's communications are built. Besides all that, it's unusual for such a globally major website to be down at all, much less for hours. From a reliability perspective, that ~6 hours that Facebook's systems were down sets them an upper limit of 99.93% availability for the year.
spurgu 5y ago
> Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore. Same. But I've also stopped using Messenger lately, mostly because I haven't had much of a social life due to Covid. Messenger is super convenient though to get in touch with people, as you don't have to exchange phone numbers to be able to message someone you recently met. But at the same time I'm worried that years worth of my private communication are being stored unencrypted and eventually leaked, so I've been nudging friends I communicate with frequently off FB, successfully (Signal or Whatsapp). All that said I do miss FB a bit, since a lot of actual friend updates happen there. I don't really understand people who complain about political bullshit. I suppose a) you don't have proper adblockers (if political ads are a thing in your area) and/or b) you are friends with the wrong people. But also, as you say, people are too afraid to share the more intimate stuff that made it interesting and social in the first place. So it's kind of a dead end.
throwawaycities 5y ago
Your post sounds an a lot like an addict “chasing the dragon”. Complete with how great it was in the beginning, how it’s no longer as good as it was you first started, how you are no longer satisfied and hoping for something new to come around that would be as good as when you first started using.
a_bonobo 5y ago
it's not that Facebook is boring or interesting, it's that we're hostages [1]. If I would delete my Facebook, I would lose contact to a whole slew of people I've encountered over the years, who I chat to once in a while over messenger, or I see that they've done something. It's bitter to cut these people out of my life. (here the 'addict' image works again; former addicts often need to cut their drinking/drug buddies out of their life to stay clean, even though they may be real friends) Stopping myspace, on the other hand, felt a bit less bitter, perhaps because that was more like an adolescent phase everyone grew out of. [1] hostage term from @doctorow https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1441107515865849866 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1441107515865849866
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  I don’t think there really is a need to get rid of Facebook completely if you use it for useful things. If you don’t do much there you don’t feed them any information and or contribute to toxic discussions.
pickle-wizard 5y ago
In the early days of Facebook, I really liked it. Like you said it was nice to see what everyone was up to. Then it changed, and the signal to noise ratio went to about 0. I had to unfollow so many people because I got tried of all the political stuff (from both sides). Anymore my feed is just ads. I don't see how people enjoy it anymore. Guess they like all the doom scrolling.

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
    Because I spent years researching my conditions. A lot of people on the forums have as well. Plus some treatments show up again and again as “this worked for me” For example I was getting up 10x a night to pee for years. Kept seeing post to try aloe Vera freeze dried pills. $$$ Finally tried it. And I slept through the night now. Understanding test is another one. A crap ton of doctors will see a negative test and automatically declare you don’t have X condition even if you have every single symptom. Eventually you learned that a large percentage usually get negatives on that test. That there are alternate test that can be run. But most doctors aren’t even aware they exist. Oh so a lot of the moral and legal support. Imagine having the flu for 30 years And trying to live a normal life. Everyone calling you lazy and a whiner and if you try and do something about it you get labeled as a hypochondriac and it all being dismissed as anxiety. Some diseases take on average seven years or more to get diagnosed because because of these problems; mine took 20 years.
- KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  Reddit used to be really great for this type of community when subreddits could customize stuff and even have a dedicated Wiki. It's really gone the opposite direction in the last few years. They still can have these things but the tools are literally 10+ years behind.
gfxgirl 5y ago
maybe you need to curate your feed? mine is no memes and few ads which I ignore. it's all posts from family and friends . also stopped following friends who I aren't close and friends that post too much
- amelius 5y ago
  If you unfollow people, Facebook will just fill the gap in your newsfeed with more stupid memes and ads.
- itake 5y ago
  I certainly could curate my following list more, but that takes too much time. Manually unfollowing ~1.1k is boring. Also, I am in FB groups b/c at one point they were important to me (like looking for housing in SF). I don't exactly want to leave the group b/c I know I will need it later, nor do I want to deal with unfollowing all of the groups I don't are about.
  - nmstoker 5y ago
    Sounds like being the FB equivalent of an IRL hoarder! Why not drop out the groups and rejoin in the unlikely event you really do need them later? Most people I know get by very well with no FB groups at all.
    - itake 5y ago
      I've certainly done left and rejoined before. I worry that Group moderators might not allow me back in (either they stop accepting new members or get annoyed at someone for jumping in and out). Also, there is some friction with joining Groups. Group owners ask filter questions and delay admissions by days. You can "unfollow" groups, but that requires a few clicks. FB groups are the best way for me to find roommate-style housing. "{city|country} expat" Groups help me plan my travels and answer questions. I don't know of other platforms that provide this service for me at low costs.
- im3w1l 5y ago
  Why would I spend a lot of effort on getting myself addicted?

standardUser 5y ago

I follow a certain set of pages/groups for some hobbies and have muted almost everything else, including almost all people. You can pretty much make a custom feed that way, though the quality will depend on the quality of posts in those groups (which is on average very low). Instagram still sort of works like an actual social network for me. I've found it's actually super important for dating (in my age group/scene/whathaveyou).

betwixthewires 5y ago

You know what, you're right, I never noticed this change, probably because I quit FB years ago. It's just a content aggregator now, there's not much social about it aside from FOMO.

colpabar 5y ago

I deleted my account several years ago and tried to get my girlfriend at the time to do the same thing. She was in favor of the idea, but facebook would show her a bunch of people with a message like "but what about all these people, won't you miss them?" and it did a great job of picking people who she most likely would not have kept in contact with if not for facebook, so she never deleted it. I think FOMO is the main reason most people are still on there, not so much "addiction".

coliveira 5y ago
You don't need to delete your account, you just need to delete the app in your phone and the job is done.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Not if you've got a browser...

yosito 5y ago

> I wish someone would make a site like that again! On a technical level, it's not hard. On business level, it's doubtful if there's a compelling enough business model to prevent it from becoming another surveillance capitalism platform. And on a societal level, it seems impossible that living generations will ever trust a platform en masse again enough to achieve such ubiquity.

jay_kyburz 5y ago
I'm convinced that there is a service people will pay for. My idea is that _somebody_ in a social group will want it to happen, and that they can pay for the whole group.
- yosito 5y ago
  I paid to boost a Discord server for my whole friend group, and they still insist on sticking to the WhatsApp group chat because "we don't want to download another app, everybody already uses WhatsApp".
wintermutestwin 5y ago
Non-profit would be a perfect business model. It isn't like that level of functionality requires a multi $B company to run it.
- yosito 5y ago
  "Non-profit" is a type of business, but not a business model.
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    You are technically correct, but "non-profit" designation opens up the potential for a healthy and positive business model that doesn't rely on the theft of user data.

s5300 5y ago

To my knowledge, it's sort of like a retirement home for old people or those with no real career, especially angry ones. I was in an AT&T store the other day when Facebook went down, dealing with something stupid. I hadn't really touched the internet that day up to that point, blissfully unaware of the Facebook issues. During the last five minutes I was there, in the physical AT&T store, some lady who was in her 50's, or really rough 40's, came in screaming about not being able to get into Facebook on her phone (I presume her only method of internet access) - & also about an uptick of spam calls and texts, I can only hilariously imagine why she's getting them. Not too long after I got home I read about the Facebook outage, and it hit me that was the reason she was in there. The employees also seemed unaware as I could hear them discussing standard diagnostics on her phone. But yeah, that person in middle America had absolutely nothing better going on in life than to drive roughly 10 minutes or more (near all residential areas are far away from this store, fairly rural) because she couldn't get on Facebook for a few hours. She was... very not nice to the employees too.

ben_w 5y ago

What hooks people like us (whatever that means) isn’t necessarily what hooks normal people (ditto). Facebook has a massive training set at its disposal, claiming more monthly active users than humans have lifetime heartbeats. If FB isn’t chronically addictive for normal people with that sample size, then either (0) A/B testing isn’t as capable as we like to think it is, or (1) FB isn’t even trying anymore.

HPsquared 5y ago
They don't necessarily need to target normal people, it's possible that over time they have optimized their site to attract those with certain traits that are most profitable.
- svachalek 5y ago
  This is sadly true. Genuine social interaction is rewarding but not addictive, as evidenced by thousands of years of history. And there's not a lot of ways to profit from it. On the other hand, getting people to come back every day or every hour for messages that compel them to buy things or vote a certain way is priceless to the right bidders.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Hm, could be, if the whales collectively outspend the rest of us collectively.

999900000999 5y ago

I’m in the same boat. I still use it for messenger, but most days I don’t even look at Facebook. You can still meet people in real life, just the other day I asked out a girl at a concert and we got drinks afterwards. That’s much more straightforward than installing 30 apps and chatting with bots. In fact I had a girl offer to add me on Instagram and I just said no. It’s not that serious ( plus typically if she won’t give you her number she doesn’t actually want to date you.) I’ll agree Facebook used to be much better. For example I was( like 10 years ago) in a college group and I actually went out with a girl from that. I think if your in a closed community it can still be fun.

klyrs 5y ago

Herein lies the banality: facebook is boring, but if you're bored, it's better than nothing. I don't begrudge folks using it to pass the time on transit to avoid interacting with the public... but I've witnessed quite a few people scrolling endlessly while half-watching tv, half-participating in face to face interactions, etc. I've fallen into that trap myself, during a period of intense burnout -- my ability to focus or produce dropped to zero, and... gotta get that dopamine.

i_am_proteus 5y ago
I'll assert that it's much worse than nothing. "Nothing" isn't bad. Meditate. Let your imagination run wild. Relax. You can't do those things on facebook dot com.
- klyrs 5y ago
  For people with severe anxiety or depression, meditation can actually aggravate the situation and do significant harm. Letting one's mind run wild in that situation leads to more anxiety, suicide planning, etc. But, I'll amend my statement: facebook is less boring than a blank screen.
  - ferrumfist 5y ago
    That's absurd. There is no scientific basis that would support your assertion. In fact, increased social media activity leads to a higher chance of suffering from depressive episodes. Meditation has been shown to to actually combat symptoms of depression. If you can't sit still with your own thoughts for 60 seconds without spiraling, then you shouldn't even be remotely near social media.
    - klyrs 5y ago
      > That's absurd. There is no scientific basis that would support your assertion. Why are you so confident in that? Have you done your research? I learned that from a licensed psychologist, and know several people who have had severely negative reactions to "mindfulness" training, but it only took 30 seconds to find these two links: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210202-how-mindfulness-can-blunt-your-feelings-and-spike-anxiety https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210202-how-mindfulnes... https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251840-mindfulness-and-meditation-can-worsen-depression-and-anxiety/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251840-mindfulness-and... > If you can't sit still with your own thoughts for 60 seconds without spiraling, then you shouldn't even be remotely near social media. Not exactly disagreeing with you here, but neither is meditation necessarily better. Therapy is probably the best thing, but social media is "free." And, note that I'm not in favor of social media, merely explaining the cost-benefit analysis that people in this hole use. Reasoning from your high horse will result in different cost-benefit analysis, which won't make any sense to the people whose lives you might like to improve.

afavour 5y ago

I feel as though it's impossible for anyone to write a thread on HN about Facebook without someone immediately coming in and saying that Facebook is stupid and they deleted their account years ago. Yeah, me too. But you usually don't have to look beyond your immediate family to find someone that uses Facebook (or at the very least an FB-owned property) a ton. We aren't typical!

speedybird 5y ago
If quitting facebook is framed as impossible, then those who want to quit will feel helpless. Posts like the one above are helpful because they tell people that there is hope. You can quit facebook. Should we tell alcoholics that they'll never quit and their plight is hopeless? Or do we amplify the voices of those who succeeded in quitting, in the hopes that others may find inspiration to do the same? I'll do the latter.
- seoaeu 5y ago
  What we shouldn't do is amplify the voices of people who were never addicted in the first place. That doesn't provide hope, if anything it works to de-legitimize how challenging quitting can be
  - speedybird 5y ago
    My read of captainmuon's comment is that captainmuon once considered themself addicted to facebook.
- scrapcode 5y ago
  I grew up in "Small Town America" in a large family and was really one of the "few" to ever move away (if any). The "problem" for me is that there really isn't an alternative to Facebook for sharing pictures and videos of my son and family for my close family to be a part of. I could have a personal blog, gallery, etc, but my grandparents that are on facebook (my son's great grandparents) don't get to see how much all of their friends enjoy them as well, etc. In that sense, it's really not so much a problem. It's been an amazing crutch to a sort of depression caused by thoughts such as "my son is lucky enough to have his great grandparents and I'm across the Nation chasing money," etc. I guess I'm one of the ones really stuck in the rut.

jay_kyburz 5y ago

>I wish someone would make a site like that again! I will make a site similar to that. I really want to. I have plan all drawn up for how it will work. Its ad free, but with premium services for those willing to pay. One member of a family or group can pay for everybody. The site is ephemeral, all posts are removed after three months. Its not a place where you store all your photos. Its a site where friends and families share their holidays, their baby photos and birthday invitations. There won't be sharing news. I'm not scared to take on the behemoth, I'm one guy in a home office. I only need a few thousand subscribers to make it worth my while. I've got about 2 years left on my current project, then I'm going to start.

randycupertino 5y ago
This actually sounds super cool and I think would fill a void a lot of families/groups are using right now with group texting. Godspeed!
teflonbungee 5y ago
Maaaan I wish I could get in on something like this. I’m a noob web dev and I’d love to work on a substantial project with a skilled dev. This sounds like a really cool idea.

ed_elliott_asc 5y ago

I think my wife is addicted, she will pick up her phone to do one thing but first goes to Facebook and scrolls, then she forgets what she was using her phone for. Maybe not addicted but she has a habit of going to Facebook every time she uses her phone.

cutler 5y ago
To my partner the internet was down, not Facebook and Instagram. I tried to explain the difference but to no avail.
root_axis 5y ago
That doesn't seem at all like addiction to me, that's just a mundane routine. If she had a panic attack when FB went down this week then I think we could say it's an addiction.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Sounds like that Afroman song, to me. "I was gonna clean my room, but then I got high..." If a habitual behavior is bad enough to interrupt somebody's ability to accomplish routine tasks, then it's pretty conclusively an addiction.
  - root_axis 5y ago
    but it's not. the vast vast majority of people spend a few minutes scrolling through fb, the same way people here scroll through HN, it's a totally meaningless time waster.
    - klyrs 5y ago
      When you open your phone to do something other than look at HN, get distracted by HN, and forget why you opened your phone, that's a problem. Scrolling a few minutes here and there isn't the problem.
      - 5y ago

ljm 5y ago

> Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore You are not 'most people' then

fsckboy 5y ago
he wrote a substantive post, the main thrust of which you're not responding to. what he said is how captivating he found facebook before they made a number of changes to it. So he is actually saying he is a part of most people, give what he says some creedence.

meijer 5y ago

Wait... you could see who looks at your page?

devit 5y ago

I think the addicted people still use it like you are describing (as well as looking at the feed).

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"And you would obsessively watch who looks at your page ..." I used a relatively small-scale website with all this functionality before Facebook or the term "social network" existed. However regarding seeing who visits a profile, I do not remember Facebook ever allowed the user to see who was viewing their profile. Today, one can create a "page" (cf. profile) and Facebook lets one pay to promote a page. Facebook gives some very basic metrics on whether the page is getting visits, with less detail than a basic web server log. It might be interesting if Facebook allowed users to see who was accessing their profile because from what I have profiles are routinely being accessed by accounts that the user is not aware of. Facebook might seem "dead" to some folks as they do not see much activity, however there may be regular activity that they cannot see. Their data is being used by Facebook and their profile data is being accessed. Connections are being made. (As in connecting the user to other people, locations, institutions, etc.)

Lamad123 5y ago

I use messenger only on desktop but it is painfully slow.. Even message notifications load after many seconds

karaterobot 5y ago

People talk about how boring Facebook is, but two days ago, when it went down for a few hours, it was all anybody talked about. There were multiple "Facebook is down!" threads here on HN, including a 1200+ comment thread about it. You can say "well, that was just morbid curiosity..." but then I'd ask for a pointer to another equally urgent response to an event. Any event. If all the smart kids find Facebook boring and not-at-all addictive then why did it suck up all the oxygen on the internet when it disappeared for a couple hours?

speedybird 5y ago
A FAANG going down for hours is interesting even to people who don't associate with that company. You're trying to frame this as a contradiction, but it isn't.
InitialLastName 5y ago
There's a difference between Facebook, Inc (the company whose services were down) and facebook.com (the website that this article is about, which people are saying is "over"). It wasn't just Facebook (the social media website) that was down, though; it was Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down (if you're keeping score, that's 3-4 of the top 10 apps for both iOS and Android, depending on how you count Messenger), a large number of services that (surprisingly to many people) turned out to depend on Facebook's services, and a general firestorm of DNS DDOS's from services trying to access Facebook.com. That turns into a large portion of the internet behaving badly, not even counting that Whatsapp is the commons on which much of the non-US world's communications are built. Besides all that, it's unusual for such a globally major website to be down at all, much less for hours. From a reliability perspective, that ~6 hours that Facebook's systems were down sets them an upper limit of 99.93% availability for the year.

spurgu 5y ago

> Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore. Same. But I've also stopped using Messenger lately, mostly because I haven't had much of a social life due to Covid. Messenger is super convenient though to get in touch with people, as you don't have to exchange phone numbers to be able to message someone you recently met. But at the same time I'm worried that years worth of my private communication are being stored unencrypted and eventually leaked, so I've been nudging friends I communicate with frequently off FB, successfully (Signal or Whatsapp). All that said I do miss FB a bit, since a lot of actual friend updates happen there. I don't really understand people who complain about political bullshit. I suppose a) you don't have proper adblockers (if political ads are a thing in your area) and/or b) you are friends with the wrong people. But also, as you say, people are too afraid to share the more intimate stuff that made it interesting and social in the first place. So it's kind of a dead end.

throwawaycities 5y ago

Your post sounds an a lot like an addict “chasing the dragon”. Complete with how great it was in the beginning, how it’s no longer as good as it was you first started, how you are no longer satisfied and hoping for something new to come around that would be as good as when you first started using.

a_bonobo 5y ago

it's not that Facebook is boring or interesting, it's that we're hostages [1]. If I would delete my Facebook, I would lose contact to a whole slew of people I've encountered over the years, who I chat to once in a while over messenger, or I see that they've done something. It's bitter to cut these people out of my life. (here the 'addict' image works again; former addicts often need to cut their drinking/drug buddies out of their life to stay clean, even though they may be real friends) Stopping myspace, on the other hand, felt a bit less bitter, perhaps because that was more like an adolescent phase everyone grew out of. [1] hostage term from @doctorow https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1441107515865849866 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1441107515865849866

spaetzleesser 5y ago
I don’t think there really is a need to get rid of Facebook completely if you use it for useful things. If you don’t do much there you don’t feed them any information and or contribute to toxic discussions.

pickle-wizard 5y ago

In the early days of Facebook, I really liked it. Like you said it was nice to see what everyone was up to. Then it changed, and the signal to noise ratio went to about 0. I had to unfollow so many people because I got tried of all the political stuff (from both sides). Anymore my feed is just ads. I don't see how people enjoy it anymore. Guess they like all the doom scrolling.