16 ms·

The high price we pay for social media

151 points by samizdis 4y ago

amelius 4y ago
The experiment is over. It failed. Social media didn't bring us what we hoped it would bring us, and its cons outweigh its pros. Perhaps we should organize a national poll against social media. It is time we admit that the Amish were right to a certain extent, and if it helps: believing that technology only brings value is in itself much like a religion.
- vocram 4y ago
  > We We who? Most of the people enjoy them and spend on them a large part of their time. They don’t want to give up.
  - digitalengineer 4y ago
    We once said the same thing about smoking…
    - mensetmanusman 4y ago
      People will make choices you disagree with…
      - hackerlight 4y ago
        All well and good until they ask for my money to treat their self-caused metabolic syndrome and lung cancer, or when their self-induced depression causes them to vote for a populist authoritarian that takes my rights away. People's self-destructive personal choices ultimately impacts on others.
    - bumby 4y ago
      And still say the same about junk food…
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Alcohol/sugar/Sat fats/sitting/using fossil fuels/plastics/etc
- closedloop129 4y ago
  Like the Romans ignored the early steam engines? Have you seen the social network behind the css gear submission [1]? >nobody has gotten it quite right yet >we think existing platforms have some good ideas, but no one’s managed to create one without profound flaws. we’re borrowing liberally from other sites, but we want to build cohost into something that works well and serves its users rather than just another clone. There is a huge probability that we haven't figured it out yet. Instead of quitting, we should double down and try new things. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32123804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32123804
  - amelius 4y ago
    > Instead of quitting, we should double down and try new things. If you can find a way to effectively fight fake news, then there is something to be said for it. Otherwise, sorry, but we've seen enough already.
    - mawise 4y ago
      I hadn't heard of cohost, but there's something to be said about curation--which seems to be their proposed approach to discovery. This is a big part of the service newspapers and libraries (used to?) provide. There's an argument to be made that curation equates to censorship, but I think it's wrong. Anyone can write anything on the internet, but that doesn't come with the right to have your message amplified just because it pisses off a lot of people.
    - closedloop129 4y ago
      It may be naive but I think all you need are accounts linked to human identities and a central repository of facts and sources. When something is reported, OP can check his facts and alter his content or insist on his view. The reporter then can double down and a moderator looks at it. Request a down payment for both content and reports, and moderation pays for itself when the losing party has to pay the process. Don't allow people to post new content as long as a report is open. The expensive part is the repository of facts. That has to be maintained with membership fees of the social network.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  I don’t know what we had hoped to get from social media, but for a brief period of time, 15 years ago, it was fun. The stopped when ads once again was called upon to save a business that failed to make a sales pitch directly to its end-users. It not the fault of the ads as such. It is a reasonable solution, if you can accept that it will never make you insanely wealthy. Sadly that not what happens. Companies keep pushing and pushing to make as much money as possible, forcing their platforms into attention hoarding machines. Platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, no longer serve any purpose other than sell attention and killing other platforms that would stand in the way of them making a few extra dollars. For a brief time in history social media provide us with a bit more fun. It allowed us to be a bit more social. Then corporate greed took it away, almost as fast.
  - neilalexander 4y ago
    I'm not really convinced that _anyone_ ever really had an up-front vision for what social media could bring to the table, either good or bad. To me, it always seemed more like a solution in search of a problem, which in turn just ended up creating more problems.
    - mrweasel 4y ago
      Take Facebook, for a brief few years it did bring your closer to old friends and family, if you let it. In the quest for profit, that feature seemed to be the first to die off. Maybe it wasn't a vision, but it could have been.
    - slfnflctd 4y ago
      It's pretty simple to me. It started out as a way to remove the barrier to creating a personal website. Why would someone want a personal website? So you don't have to explain everything about yourself to every new person you meet. They can see what your interests are, what kind of ideas or projects you promote, and learn more about your quirks. This helps filter out those who would clash with you, as well as giving potential friends or colleagues a much smoother on-ramp to future interactions. That was in the MySpace days. At some point, Facebook took over because it was a more standardized interface with more bells & whistles, and eliminated the issue of really ugly page designs made by amateurs with auto-playing audio of music you might hate. For a little while, FB was a superior product. Then, they started messing with The Feed so it was more likely to do things that benefited the company. There was some uproar, but it was ignored and those voices turned out to be an inconsequential minority. Other platforms followed suit. This was the turning point which soured the whole experiment. I still think it can be quite useful when you're hyper-focused on using it to enhance offline interactions and/or certain collaborative efforts. But if you're just idly bouncing around, The Feed will hijack your brain and start pushing you toward things the company thinks will make it more money. The problem is that social media became an end unto itself, rather than a tool to facilitate other things. Apparently there were hundreds of millions of people with a bunch of idle time who didn't want to do anything challenging with that time other than occasionally be enticed to spend money in an attempt to make themselves feel better about their lives. Their eyeballs were ripe for the harvest. And now we have to reckon with all the unforseen ways this has changed our culture, including the whole 'influencer' plague. It takes a lot of discipline to avoid the siren's call of FOMO, and most people are not sufficiently equipped to do it. It's inextricably intertwined with our failures to adequately address the mental health needs of the wider population as well. All those of us who are better off can do is lead by example.
- myspy 4y ago
  Social media as it is done by Facebook is the major problem. We need no algorithmic timelines, no manipulation what can be seen by a company. Just what you follow is a scrollable timeline. Group features that cannot be moderated need to be banned. Forums were good because the mods kept it together. Same goes for commentaries to posts.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    Not just Facebook, all of the big platforms. Twitter and Reddit also stoke division, outrage, echo chambers for profit. Example of bad faith from Twitter: allowing users to disable replies in order to prevent harassment by mobs, but still sneakily allowing mobs to use quote tweets to dunk. It's transparent. They just want to appear to be addressing the problem (maybe to placate a small contingent of outspoken employees by greenwashing) without actually addressing it. Another example of bad faith: resorting to content moderation because the real fix (altering dynamics) will cost them engagement. What's needed is regulation. I don't think the US will be able to do it, both because of ideology and political dysfunction, it'll have to be the EU.
    - myspy 4y ago
      I agree, good post.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    Yeah for me this timeline stuff totally killed Facebook for me. It's so horrible now. They should have made it possible to keep the old feed.
  - Joeri 4y ago
    Those features are all but inevitable to an ad-funded social media platform. If you want to increase ad revenue you need people to spend more time in your app, and that means you need a constant stream of new stuff in their feed. If facebook and instagram just showed us the stuff from the people we knew, we would scroll through it, be done, and move on. Instead they push us to follow lots of people we don’t know, so there is always more new stuff and a reason to be in the app and watch ads, but now the stuff from the people we do know gets buried, so they give us an algorithmic timeline that tries to make sure that no matter how often you go in or how long you keep scrolling, there is always a reason to keep scrolling and you’re always seeing the stuff you came to see. Commentaries on posts are the same thing, every reply is a notification ping and another reason to be in the app. Ideally the discussion / group functionality has enough drama to keep people energized and posting, not so much as to turn them off completely. This is the market at work. If the current crop of social media platforms with these patterns hadn’t chosen this path, other platforms that did would have outcompeted them. The fact that people spend so much time in these platforms is proof they are really good at showing them what they want to see. Wanting to build a “healthier” social media platform is sort of like trying to make a “healthier” alcoholic beverage. We make it healthier by consuming it less, not by changing its nature, because its nature is the point of why we consume it in the first place.
- neilalexander 4y ago
  I think you're possibly right in that the cons of social media outweigh the pros at this point, but questioning the value of technology is altogether asking the wrong question and claiming "the Amish were right" is utter nonsense. It's like a workman trying to blame his tools for a job badly done. Social media is a use-case. There are plenty of other use-cases. Some of them bring value and some of them don't, but that is not the fault of the smartphone.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    "The Amish were right" != "The Amish were right to a certain extent"
- dqpb 4y ago
  > Perhaps we should organize a national poll against social media. Including HN?
- janandonly 4y ago
  What if all the users, combined, could take Twitter off the market? Imagine Twitter, but it only asks some money from subscriptions, let's say $1/year/user[1]. Now we take away all adverts. And voilà, a wonderful platform. [1] If memory serves me, this was once upon a time the yearly price for using WhatsApp.
- quest88 4y ago
  It works when you curate it. I removed lots of "friends" and family. Joined hobby groups, and now it's a good source of relevant events for me.
havblue 4y ago
I know a family with teenagers that helped this by only allowing each kid a phone without social media at first, when the kid was in eighth grade or so. And after a year they could use social media on the phone. Also, after a certain time every night they insisted everyone in the family put their phones at the charging station in the kitchen. So at least no late night social media. So they had phones they just couldn't use them for social media purposes nearly as much and not until a later age. This would take discipline but it did seem like their kids were less phone dependent and social when I've talked to them.
- nukst 4y ago
  The more articles I read about the effects of social media in mental health the more I agree with an approach like this. I think social media can be very dangerous specially because of its pushy, 'not looking harmful at first' and ostracizing nature towards those who aren't on X or Y which is the perfect bait for younger demographics. Just like when you're trying to stop drinking but it's morally acceptable for friends to insist you go drinking. I'm a late night doom scroller myself and I need to become more disciplined..
- atmosx 4y ago
  The kitchen thing is quite popular and seems to work wonders for peers as a well, knowing that a good chunk of the classroom will be offline after 9PM.
- styfle 4y ago
  > after a certain time every night they insisted everyone in the family put their phones at the charging station This is really great advice for anyone of any age. My sleep has improved a lot since I started leaving my phone downstairs while I sleep. (Bedroom is upstairs) Instead of reading hacker news late at night, I might read a book or talk to my wife. Instead of waking up to my phone’s alarm, I wake up to an analog clock’s alarm. I have no notifications to review until I’m ready and go downstairs.
paulsutter 4y ago
For all the flaws of social media, it’s bizarre to think back to a time that three television networks essentially controlled all news Sure it’s possible that social media will never improve, but that’s unlikely. We’ll collectively figure it out
- baxtr 4y ago
  This. People blame it on social media. But it’s the people not the media they use. I grew up way before the internet. Children on my Highschool were really mean. Many, many bullies were around. Pretty girls talking bad about less pretty girls. And much more. The big difference: we now see it on a different scale and start talking more about it. But the people haven’t changed.
  - another_story 4y ago
    Social media as a concept is not to blame, but social media companies and the tactics they use are absolutely to blame.
  - namaria 4y ago
    People have been denouncing technological advancement since the alphabet was the cutting edge in information storage.
  - bumby 4y ago
    You’re right that any technology is just a tool. But I think the real argument is the asymmetry of the power of the tool compared to our ability to rationally use it. Maybe a bad example is nuclear technology. It can be good or bad, but we recognize that the downside is just too big to allow unfettered access to it.
  - walleeee 4y ago
    > it's the people not the media they use This echoes nature vs nurture in psychology and can be debated interminably because the truth is it's not just one or the other, it's both We need to acknowledge the powerful ways our tools influence our behavior, just as we need to recognize and reclaim our own agency in using them. Both these perspectives must coexist if we are to form mature relationships with our technology
crikeyjoe 4y ago
psychstudio 4y ago
Everyone now has their own personal Skinner box. To me it just seems so dystopian.
dmje 4y ago
I think I'd amend the piece a bit. Personally I think we're playing a high price for mobile phones. Granted, much of the harm is being done by social, but really it's the addictive nature, the "always on-ness" of this that concerns me the most, in all the reading, research and life experience I'm doing. My son, who is now 17, spends - I would imagine, he doesn't know because he's too frightened to switch on Screen Time - maybe 10-14 hours a day glued to his phone. He's now at an age where I have no agency over him - he's an adult in 6 months and he's got to figure out his own way - but it worries me. In his specific case I'm actually less worried than with many of his friends. He's bright, and uses the internet to figure out and watch some pretty rad stuff. It isn't all shit, and although a fair proportion of his use is Insta, it's using it as an instant messaging tool rather than a pure "social media" tool. He rarely posts, and I suspect may be different to his (female) friends in that regard. But here are the two points that are rarely talked about that are actually the most important ones to consider: First, if anyone was doing anything for 12 hours a day, it's probably an issue. If my kids played football for 12 hours a day, or made Lego, or cooked, I'd be concerned. It's just not healthy to be that ensconced in a thing, let alone when that thing is as hugely, highly addictive as phone use / social media. Even if that thing was the healthiest thing in the world - say someone I knew went out running for 12 hours a day - man, I'd be concerned. Secondly, it strikes me as "out there in the world" that this is the biggest issue. To me, as a 50 year old man, it's bloody weird anyone spending this much time online, but to be outdoors, or at a bar, or a restaurant with your partner, or looking after your kids, or looking at a sunset, or on the beach - and be constantly in your phone - this is insane. Living a life, a real life, with real relationships and real sunsets and real beaches - is an enormous privilege. Many of us are wasting it. Life is short. Leave your phone at home, and truly live it.
- bumby 4y ago
  I would be curious if those downvoting this could elaborate on their disagreement to help foster conversation
  - dmje 4y ago
    Me too. Hilariously I got the first downvote about 10 seconds after posting it, not enough time for anyone to actually read my thoughts.. :-)
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Try to fast from devices one day per week.
damagednoob 4y ago
Where is the crossover point from 'ignorance is bliss' to 'uninformed'? There's no doubt in my mind that women (and men) would be happier if they didn't know about the Roe verdict in America. But wouldn't that lead to less activism on an issue that really matters? It is notoriously difficult to get young voters to turn out and asking them to turn off their phones for the mid-terms (like in the article) when they should be thinking through the issues feels counter-productive in a democracy.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > It is notoriously difficult to get young voters to turn out and asking them to turn off their phones for the mid-terms (like in the article) The experiment was to turn off social media, not turn off their phones. You can still get news directly from news sources, rather than indirectly from social media, which is not generally the primary source of news.
  - damagednoob 4y ago
    That is true however the abstract of the study notes: "In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election... ...(ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization;" [1]: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658
    - lapcat 4y ago
      1) It was a 4 week experiment. This may show that the participants had become too reliant on Facebook for news. It seems likely that people will adapt after qutting Facebook entirely. 2) How likely is activism to come from people who are only connected to the outside world via Facebook? 3) Reduced "factual news knowledge" is not the same as "didn't know about the Roe verdict". I was somehow aware of the verdict without being on Facebook. It's hard to tell from just the abstract, but we don't know how they define "factual news knowledge". In my opinion, most so-called "news" is just trivia and unimportant. Politician A said X, politician B said not-X, blah blah, ad nauseam. IMO it's actually better to take a step back from the daily trivia and look at the broad historical perspective. Better to read a book than a headline. A person can become "too informed" about things that don't matter, missing the forest for the trees.
blaze33 4y ago
> It took time to demonstrate that cigarettes caused lung cancer. If social media causes depression and anxiety, it will take time to demonstrate that, too. And let's not forget the decades it then took to overcome the lobbying of the tobacco industry. Same thing with climate change, people have been writing about the perils of messing with the greenhouse effect for a good century, yet, here we are. So, let's say that at some point there is conclusive evidence that social media have costly negative side effects on society and its people. What then would the multi-billion dollars company behind this do about it? As much as cancer-free cigarettes or CO2-free combustion never really were an option, given the possibilities of the digital world, I still hope there are ways to use technology to have an overall positive influence. Nonetheless, with the same kind of sad stories that never fail to repeat themselves, I feel like there's a fundamentally deeper issue at work and I genuinely wonder, how would you, could you, "hack the system", so to say, and use all its dirty mechanics so that the pursuit of private interests would, for once, have positive externalities?
thenerdhead 4y ago
> I usually feel disheartened and a little self-loathing after doomscrolling on Twitter in a way that I never feel after reading a book or a decent magazine. Hey I'm only 30 and had a panic attack after doomscrolling on twitter during one of the heights of the pandemic and having COVID at the same time. 0/10 would not recommend. I have never experienced the same with reading a book. A great read is the "the coddling of the american mind" which talks about the instagram and social media problem with teens. Some of the stats and studies there are ringing alarms that nobody is paying attention to. I think this topic especially needs to be experienced first-hand or observed by a caring parental/teaching figure. I'm fairly young and was one of the earliest generations on social media. I've spent the last 5 years of my life on a quest to moderate my usage on the platforms that I've been addicted to since their inception. I'm even writing a book on the topic about how I've been managing it. > The results in both cases were striking, with clear improvements in a variety of measures of happiness, wellbeing, anxiety and depression. It seems that a break from social media is good for your soul. I would agree with this, but I would extend this to general technology usage and not just social media. As I get older and more senior in my career, the more and more I'd like to just go build a cabin by a pond like Thoreau(Walden). Re-connecting with nature in the meantime has done wonders for my happiness. Perhaps a bit of self-reliance goes a long way in this world where we're constantly comparing ourselves to others on social media.
mawise 4y ago
I started working on Haven[1] (FOSS, self-hosted alternative to FB) because of privacy concerns with centralized social media, but the more I explored the space, the more I felt it was important for the mental-health and societal stability purposes. The article references Jonathan Haidt[2], who has been a vocal participant in this space, but even Barack Obama sees it as an issue--it was the focus of his Keynote at Stanford in April[3]. If we could just get away from the engagement-optimized business model I think (hope?) we would already be in a much better space as a people. [1]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-... [3]: https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-on-disinformation-at-stanford-7d7af7ba28af https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-on-disinformation-...
xxxtentacijs 4y ago
Yep. People need to seriously consider exiting smartphones and social media as I wrote here: https://backtohumanity.substack.com/p/exiting-the-metaverse https://backtohumanity.substack.com/p/exiting-the-metaverse
alexalx666 4y ago
Lets stop calling Facebook, Instagram and Twitter social media, it's like we can not say the Devil's name aloud. More productive approach would be find acceptable for-profit social media definition and fund it.
PeterStuer 4y ago
I quit Facebook September 2017. I felt myself being drawn into a permanent 'fight' mode, and didn't like it. I originally did it as a 'let us silence this for a month and see what gives. After the month, I did not want to come back. I briefly tried to re-engage in 2020, but that lasted about a week as polarized toxicity on the platform seemed to have gotten a lot worse than even before. I didn't delete my account as I still use Messenger. If you feel even 10% bad about your FB habits, take a 1 month brake and see. Don't worry about missing something. I look at my 2017 posts and shares, after all I just need to scroll down through a few years of "happy birthday' wishes, and they're still no different than what I would have shared last week if I was still on there. Just give it a try.
- mod 4y ago
  I took a similar approach, but I need messenger and I often use marketplace. So I unfollowed every human in my feed. I doubt I've got them all yet, a few months in, but some old friends the algorithm just never shows. I replaced it with some groups about hobbies like fishing and motorcycling, but I'm finding even that is just all arguments, gear reviews, spam, and rule reminders. So I'm gonna phase that out, too. Anyway it definitely keeps me from scrolling. If there's any posts I want to see, I'll never know it and I expect I'll be the better for it.
tasty_freeze 4y ago
My daughter attended a Waldorf school (in Europe I believe they are called Steiner schools, after the founder, Rudolph Steiner). There were good things about it and bad things, and I know the experience varies a lot with the particular school and the particular teacher you draw (the same cohort of kids and the same teacher travel grades 1-8 together). My daughter had an amazing teacher so overall I'm happy with the experience. One of their policies, something we had to literally sign on to, was that our kids would not consume any mass media: no TVs, no movie theaters, no radio, no laptop, no cellphone. That policy long predates laptops and cell phones. The net effect is that Waldorf families can be friends only with other Waldorf families otherwise (a) people think your kid is weird, (b) you are a cruel parent, (c) your kid will want to spend all their time at Jane's house doing nothing but watching TV. It is one of the aspects of their approach that I really appreciated and had a notable effect on the kids' behavior. Bored? Draw something. Go outside and lift up some rocks and see what is crawling underneath them. Build a fort out of found objects. See if you can stack rocks and make an arch. I've seen this happen on the playground: a kid grinds two limestone rocks together to make powder, collects it on a leaf, and pretends the powder is a magic potion; rather than being ridiculed, the other kids immediately take up the fiction and run with it. 8th grade is where they loosen the policy half way, then the next year they say there are no requirements but it is still good to try to keep it to a minimum. All of the kids were thirsty for phones by then and they get pretty sucked into it. That was 10 years ago, and the net effect on me is that I have no desire to watch TV and rarely watch movies. Having an eight year break without it taught me I'm not missing much. I work from home so I don't experience any awkward moments being culturally out of the loop at the office water cooler. The only social media accounts I have are youtube (I'm there for the content, not the comments) and HN. I believe I'm happier for it.
- winternett 4y ago
  IF you run a business that you need to promote, there is no real way around using social media to promote it in some capacity. If you are rich, you can probably just hire a marketing firm to handle the seedy underbelly of it all I guess. The problem I notice frequently with the world now is that too many people are rooted in reality by their own perceptions and understanding, and they can't understand the experiences and struggles of others. It's so comfortable to project the attitude of "It's fine for me, therefore it's fine for everyone else" that it disrupts debate and resolution of meaningful problems our world faces. We're all so used to bonding with others that have our exact same composition and outlook, that wen end up being blind to others that don't fit into that. We need to stop using individual tropes like this to dismiss and answer problems, they are really not applicable to the issue for so many others, and really not helpful in discussions. For many people around the world, finding 5$ a day for dinner based on social media posting success would dramatically change their quality of life. Social media companies literally make Billions of dollars, and share VERY LITTLE of it with contributors... Opportunity in this world is shrinking along with all the other crises many struggling people face, the matter is much larger than turning off TVs and preventing kids from using devices in schools. No offense intended, But to act as if you can simply "turn it all off" and enjoy life is not an option for many many people... Walk in the shoes of others here, look at discussions through different glasses than your own.
Kiro 4y ago
I'm also addicted to my phone but aside from Hacker News it's not social media. I spend most of my time on Wikipedia.

151 points by samizdis 4y ago

The experiment is over. It failed. Social media didn't bring us what we hoped it would bring us, and its cons outweigh its pros. Perhaps we should organize a national poll against social media. It is time we admit that the Amish were right to a certain extent, and if it helps: believing that technology only brings value is in itself much like a religion.

vocram 4y ago
> We We who? Most of the people enjoy them and spend on them a large part of their time. They don’t want to give up.
- digitalengineer 4y ago
  We once said the same thing about smoking…
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    People will make choices you disagree with…
    - hackerlight 4y ago
      All well and good until they ask for my money to treat their self-caused metabolic syndrome and lung cancer, or when their self-induced depression causes them to vote for a populist authoritarian that takes my rights away. People's self-destructive personal choices ultimately impacts on others.
  - bumby 4y ago
    And still say the same about junk food…
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Alcohol/sugar/Sat fats/sitting/using fossil fuels/plastics/etc
closedloop129 4y ago
Like the Romans ignored the early steam engines? Have you seen the social network behind the css gear submission [1]? >nobody has gotten it quite right yet >we think existing platforms have some good ideas, but no one’s managed to create one without profound flaws. we’re borrowing liberally from other sites, but we want to build cohost into something that works well and serves its users rather than just another clone. There is a huge probability that we haven't figured it out yet. Instead of quitting, we should double down and try new things. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32123804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32123804
- amelius 4y ago
  > Instead of quitting, we should double down and try new things. If you can find a way to effectively fight fake news, then there is something to be said for it. Otherwise, sorry, but we've seen enough already.
  - mawise 4y ago
    I hadn't heard of cohost, but there's something to be said about curation--which seems to be their proposed approach to discovery. This is a big part of the service newspapers and libraries (used to?) provide. There's an argument to be made that curation equates to censorship, but I think it's wrong. Anyone can write anything on the internet, but that doesn't come with the right to have your message amplified just because it pisses off a lot of people.
  - closedloop129 4y ago
    It may be naive but I think all you need are accounts linked to human identities and a central repository of facts and sources. When something is reported, OP can check his facts and alter his content or insist on his view. The reporter then can double down and a moderator looks at it. Request a down payment for both content and reports, and moderation pays for itself when the losing party has to pay the process. Don't allow people to post new content as long as a report is open. The expensive part is the repository of facts. That has to be maintained with membership fees of the social network.
mrweasel 4y ago
I don’t know what we had hoped to get from social media, but for a brief period of time, 15 years ago, it was fun. The stopped when ads once again was called upon to save a business that failed to make a sales pitch directly to its end-users. It not the fault of the ads as such. It is a reasonable solution, if you can accept that it will never make you insanely wealthy. Sadly that not what happens. Companies keep pushing and pushing to make as much money as possible, forcing their platforms into attention hoarding machines. Platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, no longer serve any purpose other than sell attention and killing other platforms that would stand in the way of them making a few extra dollars. For a brief time in history social media provide us with a bit more fun. It allowed us to be a bit more social. Then corporate greed took it away, almost as fast.
- neilalexander 4y ago
  I'm not really convinced that _anyone_ ever really had an up-front vision for what social media could bring to the table, either good or bad. To me, it always seemed more like a solution in search of a problem, which in turn just ended up creating more problems.
  - mrweasel 4y ago
    Take Facebook, for a brief few years it did bring your closer to old friends and family, if you let it. In the quest for profit, that feature seemed to be the first to die off. Maybe it wasn't a vision, but it could have been.
  - slfnflctd 4y ago
    It's pretty simple to me. It started out as a way to remove the barrier to creating a personal website. Why would someone want a personal website? So you don't have to explain everything about yourself to every new person you meet. They can see what your interests are, what kind of ideas or projects you promote, and learn more about your quirks. This helps filter out those who would clash with you, as well as giving potential friends or colleagues a much smoother on-ramp to future interactions. That was in the MySpace days. At some point, Facebook took over because it was a more standardized interface with more bells & whistles, and eliminated the issue of really ugly page designs made by amateurs with auto-playing audio of music you might hate. For a little while, FB was a superior product. Then, they started messing with The Feed so it was more likely to do things that benefited the company. There was some uproar, but it was ignored and those voices turned out to be an inconsequential minority. Other platforms followed suit. This was the turning point which soured the whole experiment. I still think it can be quite useful when you're hyper-focused on using it to enhance offline interactions and/or certain collaborative efforts. But if you're just idly bouncing around, The Feed will hijack your brain and start pushing you toward things the company thinks will make it more money. The problem is that social media became an end unto itself, rather than a tool to facilitate other things. Apparently there were hundreds of millions of people with a bunch of idle time who didn't want to do anything challenging with that time other than occasionally be enticed to spend money in an attempt to make themselves feel better about their lives. Their eyeballs were ripe for the harvest. And now we have to reckon with all the unforseen ways this has changed our culture, including the whole 'influencer' plague. It takes a lot of discipline to avoid the siren's call of FOMO, and most people are not sufficiently equipped to do it. It's inextricably intertwined with our failures to adequately address the mental health needs of the wider population as well. All those of us who are better off can do is lead by example.
myspy 4y ago
Social media as it is done by Facebook is the major problem. We need no algorithmic timelines, no manipulation what can be seen by a company. Just what you follow is a scrollable timeline. Group features that cannot be moderated need to be banned. Forums were good because the mods kept it together. Same goes for commentaries to posts.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  Not just Facebook, all of the big platforms. Twitter and Reddit also stoke division, outrage, echo chambers for profit. Example of bad faith from Twitter: allowing users to disable replies in order to prevent harassment by mobs, but still sneakily allowing mobs to use quote tweets to dunk. It's transparent. They just want to appear to be addressing the problem (maybe to placate a small contingent of outspoken employees by greenwashing) without actually addressing it. Another example of bad faith: resorting to content moderation because the real fix (altering dynamics) will cost them engagement. What's needed is regulation. I don't think the US will be able to do it, both because of ideology and political dysfunction, it'll have to be the EU.
  - myspy 4y ago
    I agree, good post.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  Yeah for me this timeline stuff totally killed Facebook for me. It's so horrible now. They should have made it possible to keep the old feed.
- Joeri 4y ago
  Those features are all but inevitable to an ad-funded social media platform. If you want to increase ad revenue you need people to spend more time in your app, and that means you need a constant stream of new stuff in their feed. If facebook and instagram just showed us the stuff from the people we knew, we would scroll through it, be done, and move on. Instead they push us to follow lots of people we don’t know, so there is always more new stuff and a reason to be in the app and watch ads, but now the stuff from the people we do know gets buried, so they give us an algorithmic timeline that tries to make sure that no matter how often you go in or how long you keep scrolling, there is always a reason to keep scrolling and you’re always seeing the stuff you came to see. Commentaries on posts are the same thing, every reply is a notification ping and another reason to be in the app. Ideally the discussion / group functionality has enough drama to keep people energized and posting, not so much as to turn them off completely. This is the market at work. If the current crop of social media platforms with these patterns hadn’t chosen this path, other platforms that did would have outcompeted them. The fact that people spend so much time in these platforms is proof they are really good at showing them what they want to see. Wanting to build a “healthier” social media platform is sort of like trying to make a “healthier” alcoholic beverage. We make it healthier by consuming it less, not by changing its nature, because its nature is the point of why we consume it in the first place.
neilalexander 4y ago
I think you're possibly right in that the cons of social media outweigh the pros at this point, but questioning the value of technology is altogether asking the wrong question and claiming "the Amish were right" is utter nonsense. It's like a workman trying to blame his tools for a job badly done. Social media is a use-case. There are plenty of other use-cases. Some of them bring value and some of them don't, but that is not the fault of the smartphone.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  "The Amish were right" != "The Amish were right to a certain extent"
dqpb 4y ago
> Perhaps we should organize a national poll against social media. Including HN?
janandonly 4y ago
What if all the users, combined, could take Twitter off the market? Imagine Twitter, but it only asks some money from subscriptions, let's say $1/year/user[1]. Now we take away all adverts. And voilà, a wonderful platform. [1] If memory serves me, this was once upon a time the yearly price for using WhatsApp.
quest88 4y ago
It works when you curate it. I removed lots of "friends" and family. Joined hobby groups, and now it's a good source of relevant events for me.

havblue 4y ago

I know a family with teenagers that helped this by only allowing each kid a phone without social media at first, when the kid was in eighth grade or so. And after a year they could use social media on the phone. Also, after a certain time every night they insisted everyone in the family put their phones at the charging station in the kitchen. So at least no late night social media. So they had phones they just couldn't use them for social media purposes nearly as much and not until a later age. This would take discipline but it did seem like their kids were less phone dependent and social when I've talked to them.

nukst 4y ago
The more articles I read about the effects of social media in mental health the more I agree with an approach like this. I think social media can be very dangerous specially because of its pushy, 'not looking harmful at first' and ostracizing nature towards those who aren't on X or Y which is the perfect bait for younger demographics. Just like when you're trying to stop drinking but it's morally acceptable for friends to insist you go drinking. I'm a late night doom scroller myself and I need to become more disciplined..
atmosx 4y ago
The kitchen thing is quite popular and seems to work wonders for peers as a well, knowing that a good chunk of the classroom will be offline after 9PM.
styfle 4y ago
> after a certain time every night they insisted everyone in the family put their phones at the charging station This is really great advice for anyone of any age. My sleep has improved a lot since I started leaving my phone downstairs while I sleep. (Bedroom is upstairs) Instead of reading hacker news late at night, I might read a book or talk to my wife. Instead of waking up to my phone’s alarm, I wake up to an analog clock’s alarm. I have no notifications to review until I’m ready and go downstairs.

paulsutter 4y ago

For all the flaws of social media, it’s bizarre to think back to a time that three television networks essentially controlled all news Sure it’s possible that social media will never improve, but that’s unlikely. We’ll collectively figure it out

baxtr 4y ago
This. People blame it on social media. But it’s the people not the media they use. I grew up way before the internet. Children on my Highschool were really mean. Many, many bullies were around. Pretty girls talking bad about less pretty girls. And much more. The big difference: we now see it on a different scale and start talking more about it. But the people haven’t changed.
- another_story 4y ago
  Social media as a concept is not to blame, but social media companies and the tactics they use are absolutely to blame.
- namaria 4y ago
  People have been denouncing technological advancement since the alphabet was the cutting edge in information storage.
- bumby 4y ago
  You’re right that any technology is just a tool. But I think the real argument is the asymmetry of the power of the tool compared to our ability to rationally use it. Maybe a bad example is nuclear technology. It can be good or bad, but we recognize that the downside is just too big to allow unfettered access to it.
- walleeee 4y ago
  > it's the people not the media they use This echoes nature vs nurture in psychology and can be debated interminably because the truth is it's not just one or the other, it's both We need to acknowledge the powerful ways our tools influence our behavior, just as we need to recognize and reclaim our own agency in using them. Both these perspectives must coexist if we are to form mature relationships with our technology

crikeyjoe 4y ago

psychstudio 4y ago

Everyone now has their own personal Skinner box. To me it just seems so dystopian.

dmje 4y ago

I think I'd amend the piece a bit. Personally I think we're playing a high price for mobile phones. Granted, much of the harm is being done by social, but really it's the addictive nature, the "always on-ness" of this that concerns me the most, in all the reading, research and life experience I'm doing. My son, who is now 17, spends - I would imagine, he doesn't know because he's too frightened to switch on Screen Time - maybe 10-14 hours a day glued to his phone. He's now at an age where I have no agency over him - he's an adult in 6 months and he's got to figure out his own way - but it worries me. In his specific case I'm actually less worried than with many of his friends. He's bright, and uses the internet to figure out and watch some pretty rad stuff. It isn't all shit, and although a fair proportion of his use is Insta, it's using it as an instant messaging tool rather than a pure "social media" tool. He rarely posts, and I suspect may be different to his (female) friends in that regard. But here are the two points that are rarely talked about that are actually the most important ones to consider: First, if anyone was doing anything for 12 hours a day, it's probably an issue. If my kids played football for 12 hours a day, or made Lego, or cooked, I'd be concerned. It's just not healthy to be that ensconced in a thing, let alone when that thing is as hugely, highly addictive as phone use / social media. Even if that thing was the healthiest thing in the world - say someone I knew went out running for 12 hours a day - man, I'd be concerned. Secondly, it strikes me as "out there in the world" that this is the biggest issue. To me, as a 50 year old man, it's bloody weird anyone spending this much time online, but to be outdoors, or at a bar, or a restaurant with your partner, or looking after your kids, or looking at a sunset, or on the beach - and be constantly in your phone - this is insane. Living a life, a real life, with real relationships and real sunsets and real beaches - is an enormous privilege. Many of us are wasting it. Life is short. Leave your phone at home, and truly live it.

bumby 4y ago
I would be curious if those downvoting this could elaborate on their disagreement to help foster conversation
- dmje 4y ago
  Me too. Hilariously I got the first downvote about 10 seconds after posting it, not enough time for anyone to actually read my thoughts.. :-)

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Try to fast from devices one day per week.

damagednoob 4y ago

Where is the crossover point from 'ignorance is bliss' to 'uninformed'? There's no doubt in my mind that women (and men) would be happier if they didn't know about the Roe verdict in America. But wouldn't that lead to less activism on an issue that really matters? It is notoriously difficult to get young voters to turn out and asking them to turn off their phones for the mid-terms (like in the article) when they should be thinking through the issues feels counter-productive in a democracy.

lapcat 4y ago
> It is notoriously difficult to get young voters to turn out and asking them to turn off their phones for the mid-terms (like in the article) The experiment was to turn off social media, not turn off their phones. You can still get news directly from news sources, rather than indirectly from social media, which is not generally the primary source of news.
- damagednoob 4y ago
  That is true however the abstract of the study notes: "In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election... ...(ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization;" [1]: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658
  - lapcat 4y ago
    1) It was a 4 week experiment. This may show that the participants had become too reliant on Facebook for news. It seems likely that people will adapt after qutting Facebook entirely. 2) How likely is activism to come from people who are only connected to the outside world via Facebook? 3) Reduced "factual news knowledge" is not the same as "didn't know about the Roe verdict". I was somehow aware of the verdict without being on Facebook. It's hard to tell from just the abstract, but we don't know how they define "factual news knowledge". In my opinion, most so-called "news" is just trivia and unimportant. Politician A said X, politician B said not-X, blah blah, ad nauseam. IMO it's actually better to take a step back from the daily trivia and look at the broad historical perspective. Better to read a book than a headline. A person can become "too informed" about things that don't matter, missing the forest for the trees.

blaze33 4y ago

> It took time to demonstrate that cigarettes caused lung cancer. If social media causes depression and anxiety, it will take time to demonstrate that, too. And let's not forget the decades it then took to overcome the lobbying of the tobacco industry. Same thing with climate change, people have been writing about the perils of messing with the greenhouse effect for a good century, yet, here we are. So, let's say that at some point there is conclusive evidence that social media have costly negative side effects on society and its people. What then would the multi-billion dollars company behind this do about it? As much as cancer-free cigarettes or CO2-free combustion never really were an option, given the possibilities of the digital world, I still hope there are ways to use technology to have an overall positive influence. Nonetheless, with the same kind of sad stories that never fail to repeat themselves, I feel like there's a fundamentally deeper issue at work and I genuinely wonder, how would you, could you, "hack the system", so to say, and use all its dirty mechanics so that the pursuit of private interests would, for once, have positive externalities?

thenerdhead 4y ago

> I usually feel disheartened and a little self-loathing after doomscrolling on Twitter in a way that I never feel after reading a book or a decent magazine. Hey I'm only 30 and had a panic attack after doomscrolling on twitter during one of the heights of the pandemic and having COVID at the same time. 0/10 would not recommend. I have never experienced the same with reading a book. A great read is the "the coddling of the american mind" which talks about the instagram and social media problem with teens. Some of the stats and studies there are ringing alarms that nobody is paying attention to. I think this topic especially needs to be experienced first-hand or observed by a caring parental/teaching figure. I'm fairly young and was one of the earliest generations on social media. I've spent the last 5 years of my life on a quest to moderate my usage on the platforms that I've been addicted to since their inception. I'm even writing a book on the topic about how I've been managing it. > The results in both cases were striking, with clear improvements in a variety of measures of happiness, wellbeing, anxiety and depression. It seems that a break from social media is good for your soul. I would agree with this, but I would extend this to general technology usage and not just social media. As I get older and more senior in my career, the more and more I'd like to just go build a cabin by a pond like Thoreau(Walden). Re-connecting with nature in the meantime has done wonders for my happiness. Perhaps a bit of self-reliance goes a long way in this world where we're constantly comparing ourselves to others on social media.

mawise 4y ago

I started working on Haven[1] (FOSS, self-hosted alternative to FB) because of privacy concerns with centralized social media, but the more I explored the space, the more I felt it was important for the mental-health and societal stability purposes. The article references Jonathan Haidt[2], who has been a vocal participant in this space, but even Barack Obama sees it as an issue--it was the focus of his Keynote at Stanford in April[3]. If we could just get away from the engagement-optimized business model I think (hope?) we would already be in a much better space as a people. [1]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-... [3]: https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-on-disinformation-at-stanford-7d7af7ba28af https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-on-disinformation-...

xxxtentacijs 4y ago

Yep. People need to seriously consider exiting smartphones and social media as I wrote here: https://backtohumanity.substack.com/p/exiting-the-metaverse https://backtohumanity.substack.com/p/exiting-the-metaverse

alexalx666 4y ago

Lets stop calling Facebook, Instagram and Twitter social media, it's like we can not say the Devil's name aloud. More productive approach would be find acceptable for-profit social media definition and fund it.

PeterStuer 4y ago

I quit Facebook September 2017. I felt myself being drawn into a permanent 'fight' mode, and didn't like it. I originally did it as a 'let us silence this for a month and see what gives. After the month, I did not want to come back. I briefly tried to re-engage in 2020, but that lasted about a week as polarized toxicity on the platform seemed to have gotten a lot worse than even before. I didn't delete my account as I still use Messenger. If you feel even 10% bad about your FB habits, take a 1 month brake and see. Don't worry about missing something. I look at my 2017 posts and shares, after all I just need to scroll down through a few years of "happy birthday' wishes, and they're still no different than what I would have shared last week if I was still on there. Just give it a try.

mod 4y ago
I took a similar approach, but I need messenger and I often use marketplace. So I unfollowed every human in my feed. I doubt I've got them all yet, a few months in, but some old friends the algorithm just never shows. I replaced it with some groups about hobbies like fishing and motorcycling, but I'm finding even that is just all arguments, gear reviews, spam, and rule reminders. So I'm gonna phase that out, too. Anyway it definitely keeps me from scrolling. If there's any posts I want to see, I'll never know it and I expect I'll be the better for it.

tasty_freeze 4y ago

My daughter attended a Waldorf school (in Europe I believe they are called Steiner schools, after the founder, Rudolph Steiner). There were good things about it and bad things, and I know the experience varies a lot with the particular school and the particular teacher you draw (the same cohort of kids and the same teacher travel grades 1-8 together). My daughter had an amazing teacher so overall I'm happy with the experience. One of their policies, something we had to literally sign on to, was that our kids would not consume any mass media: no TVs, no movie theaters, no radio, no laptop, no cellphone. That policy long predates laptops and cell phones. The net effect is that Waldorf families can be friends only with other Waldorf families otherwise (a) people think your kid is weird, (b) you are a cruel parent, (c) your kid will want to spend all their time at Jane's house doing nothing but watching TV. It is one of the aspects of their approach that I really appreciated and had a notable effect on the kids' behavior. Bored? Draw something. Go outside and lift up some rocks and see what is crawling underneath them. Build a fort out of found objects. See if you can stack rocks and make an arch. I've seen this happen on the playground: a kid grinds two limestone rocks together to make powder, collects it on a leaf, and pretends the powder is a magic potion; rather than being ridiculed, the other kids immediately take up the fiction and run with it. 8th grade is where they loosen the policy half way, then the next year they say there are no requirements but it is still good to try to keep it to a minimum. All of the kids were thirsty for phones by then and they get pretty sucked into it. That was 10 years ago, and the net effect on me is that I have no desire to watch TV and rarely watch movies. Having an eight year break without it taught me I'm not missing much. I work from home so I don't experience any awkward moments being culturally out of the loop at the office water cooler. The only social media accounts I have are youtube (I'm there for the content, not the comments) and HN. I believe I'm happier for it.

winternett 4y ago
IF you run a business that you need to promote, there is no real way around using social media to promote it in some capacity. If you are rich, you can probably just hire a marketing firm to handle the seedy underbelly of it all I guess. The problem I notice frequently with the world now is that too many people are rooted in reality by their own perceptions and understanding, and they can't understand the experiences and struggles of others. It's so comfortable to project the attitude of "It's fine for me, therefore it's fine for everyone else" that it disrupts debate and resolution of meaningful problems our world faces. We're all so used to bonding with others that have our exact same composition and outlook, that wen end up being blind to others that don't fit into that. We need to stop using individual tropes like this to dismiss and answer problems, they are really not applicable to the issue for so many others, and really not helpful in discussions. For many people around the world, finding 5$ a day for dinner based on social media posting success would dramatically change their quality of life. Social media companies literally make Billions of dollars, and share VERY LITTLE of it with contributors... Opportunity in this world is shrinking along with all the other crises many struggling people face, the matter is much larger than turning off TVs and preventing kids from using devices in schools. No offense intended, But to act as if you can simply "turn it all off" and enjoy life is not an option for many many people... Walk in the shoes of others here, look at discussions through different glasses than your own.

Kiro 4y ago

I'm also addicted to my phone but aside from Hacker News it's not social media. I spend most of my time on Wikipedia.