8 ms·

Frequent and infrequent users of social media respond differently to rewards

clircle 3y ago
If only there was a way to measure mindless sharing…
idopmstuff 3y ago
This is obviously a serious problem, but I hate the use of the word "compels" in the title. Social media does not compel people to share things. It encourages it by design, absolutely, but nobody is forced to share things. We should take it seriously, but not to the point where we eliminate any concept of human autonomy in the use of these platforms.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  Yes, it compels.... Just like heroin compels you to get more heroin. You can argue that human autonomy also has a role in it, but someone's thinking is not entirely autonomous, especially when addicted to something. Social media is addictive, and to an extent forces you to share things about yourself (there are social consequences for not doing so. I personally don't give a fuck but not everyone chooses that decision)
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    > Yes, it compels.... Just like heroin compels you to get more heroin. This is an incredibly misleading comparison. Addiction is not a monolith, and there are degrees of addiction. If you cold turkey quit a serious heroin addiction, there's a serious chance you will die. That is absolutely never the case with social media addiction. There are always times when we act against our own best interest because our body seems to override our brain - I had ice cream last night that I knew was bad for me. That doesn't mean we're compelled, and it isn't sufficient to call something addiction. What you're doing here is the equivalent of invoking Nazis in an argument on the internet - going straight to "ITS LIKE HEROIN" for anything that be somewhat addictive is incredibly reductive and degrades the quality of what could otherwise be a useful conversation.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Addiction is not a monolith, and there are degrees of addiction There are also degrees of compulsion. The law compels me to adhere to a speed limit; that doesn't mean my reptilian brain flips out if I go 66. Within the context of discussing compulsive social media use described as addictive, arguing ad absurdum with reference to heroin isn't as simple as calling everything distasteful Nazi.
    - Pannoniae 3y ago
      Note that I didn't compare social media to heroin, I've just made a simile of how something can be addictive just like heroin. I didn't say it was similarly addictive, and I didn't even compare their addictiveness, the simile was used to illustrate the point on a non-controversial example (which everyone knows is very addictive) And yes, you are entirely right - sugar and other things in that ice cream create an addiction - this is why you had ice cream yesterday even though you knew you shouldn't have had it!
    - karaterobot 3y ago
      I think you're misreading the comment. They were comparing the mechanism of addictive compulsion, not the magnitude or the consequences.
    - koprulusector 3y ago
      I think you're missing the point of the comment you're replying to, and of the story as a whole. Yes, human beings have agency and are ultimately responsible and accountable for their decisions. Human beings, like all living organisms, are complex systems. Social media, marketers and advertisers, among others, regularly manipulate and abuse such systems. So, yes, while it is true that addiction is a spectrum, that spectrum applies to social media as much as it does with other addictions like sugar or amphetamines. What your argument does is absolve those attempting to abuse such organic, complex systems for their own gain, regardless of the harm it promotes or directly causes. EDIT: - Further, in case you're missing the peer reviewed, scientific studies of social media and addiction: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=scholarly+articles+social+media+addiction https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=scholarly+articles+soci...
  - lr4444lr 3y ago
    Heroin isn't addictive because other addicts are convincing you to take it. We are a social animal in the sense that it's part of normal healthy functioning, and that isolation is considered a mode of torture. Social media is a means to connect people that is perfectly manageable if you're an intact person in the same sense that the telephone is a convenient eay to stay in touch. There is no safe dose of heroin to avoid addiction in a healthy person.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      This thread is really not about heroin, though. Take food as an example. A person can be addicted to food (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_addiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_addiction) but eating isn't otherwise necessarily unhealthy. A person may be "compelled" to take a certain action for many reasons; I fail to see how the use of that word in this title is wrong.
      - lr4444lr 3y ago
        The sine qua non of addiction is withdrawal symptoms, not compulsion. Social media isn't necessary if you have a productive social life replacement. There is no analog substitute for heroin.
        lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
        > The sine qua non of addiction is withdrawal symptoms, not compulsion. This statement refutes the idea that social media or food can possibly be addictive, yet there's this body of research for both which asserts they can be. At best, this is splitting hairs over the definition of addiction. Assuming that Something can be addictive, a person might be "compelled" to act by their addiction to Something.
- hammock 3y ago
  Compel has broader/more varied meaning than you are giving it. "His hunger compelled him to eat" is a perfectly reasonable use of the word
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  Compel is an apt word to use in this situation. Definition is: "force or oblige (someone) to do something" or "bring about (something) by the use of force or pressure" [Oxford Dictionary]. Social media can make people feel _obliged_ by social pressure to engage in the platform (via sharing or posting updates about their life to family members and/or friends). Addiction can also do the same thing, while others may be bored and scroll incessantly (they feel the need to stave off boredom). There is a myriad of reasons. I felt compelled to respond to your insistence that 'compel' was an incorrect word.
beauHD 3y ago
> After a time, habitual or frequent users become desensitized to positive feedback, such as likes and comments, from other users. I've noticed this personally. In my early social media days circa 2012, going viral with a post of mine evoked genuine gratefulness for the post and appreciation for how much reach it got. Now, going viral is just a habit. 10,000 likes, 1000 shares on Facebook is my new normal. It's not 'special' like it used to be. I still appreciate my viral posts, just not to the extent of my early social media days (this is probably because fewer people were on it in 2012).
- xyst 3y ago
  The dopamine hit from the like/share notification no longer hits like it did in 2012. Reminds me of drug addicts building tolerance and upping usage to get same “high”. Probably get the same feeling again if you hit 100K or 1M interactions Personally, haven’t cared since 2015. FB — stopped using for socials but use its marketplace for selling/buying. IG - keep an account but otherwise have stopped using it. Still use anonymous social media like HN or reddit. Although lately stick to the fediverse — mastodon, lemmy, and matrix.
  - dingnuts 3y ago
    tbh I think admitting in public that you use mastodon or lemmy outs you as a fringe nut, just like using 4chan /pol/ does
    - Pannoniae 3y ago
      Is that a problem though? You'll filter the people you want to interact with, effectively. I'd personally probably talk more to someone who goes to /pol/ than someone who goes on IG and TikTok. If you say "I use mastodon" that also creates an in-group effect, anyone else who does the same or similar are more likely to hit you up with a conversation due to that fact :)
    - skyyler 3y ago
      What makes you say that? Most of my friend groups are migrating towards mastodon. I haven't noticed any political connotations.
deweywsu 3y ago
This really rings true. I think....hold on, I have to post something on Instagram.
xyst 3y ago
These companies have hired focus groups, marketing experts, psychologists, and countless design teams to get people hooked on their platform. Are we really surprised? Multimillion dollar team vs primitive brain of human. Many people bound to lose and fall through. I think the problem is rooted in a large swath of society growing up in isolation. The past few decades has seen a sharp rise in suburban or exurb living (living in isolation), car centric transportation (traveling in isolation), and social media (socializing in isolation). High levels of partisanship in the states as well is not a coincidence. We have generations of children growing up playing video games in the suburbs because that’s all you can do from the moment you are born to the day you become an adult (or get a car).
- hooande 3y ago
  > These companies have hired focus groups, marketing experts, psychologists, and countless design teams to get people hooked on their platform. Are we really surprised? I don't think that this is the problem. From what I know, hackernews doesn't hire any marketing experts, psychologists or focus groups. It doesn't even support images. I was more addicted to this site than any other, despite the lack of psychological tricks. And there are many sites that DO employ full psychological warfare teams that I completely ignore. Tinder seemed fully committed to forcing repetitive user engagement. And I dropped that site after about two days, psychologists or not. If all it took to force engagement was a certain list of UI tricks, every funded social site would be able to do it. I don't think there's a single root cause or an off switch for social media. This phenomenon is here to stay, for better or worse. I think that we will adapt as a species but there's no going back.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Endless A/B testing will climb up some peak in the landscape of human psychology; that you and I are on a different peak may help a bit, but there are ways to find other peaks and money to be made in the attempt. (I'm apparently on peak "Idle Game", and thus benefited greatly from the end of Flash browser games freeing me from that pointless waste of time).
psychphysic 3y ago
It's funny that we're so compelled to innumerate all the ways social media is toxic and not do anything about it. Yet Canada is considering printing individual warnings on cigarettes despite fully saturating understanding that smoking is bad. I'm fully with each and every tweet warning you "tweeting makes you a dickbag please reconsider"
- trescenzi 3y ago
  https://xkcd.com/481/ https://xkcd.com/481/
- ben_w 3y ago
  > I'm fully with each and every tweet warning you "tweeting makes you a dickbag please reconsider" I vaguely recall somewhere had a speech synthesiser read everyone's comments back at them before letting people post them. Someone un-ironically complained it made them "sound stupid". (I think it was YouTube? Not sure).
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    If this isn't real, I'd guess you're remembering the XKCD linked in a sibling comment to yours. I kinda like your version more. The XKCD version where the poster has an actual moment of introspective clarity doesn't make sense to my cynical mind.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      If it is me misremembering fiction as fact, it wouldn't be the first time… (Even if I do have a strong memory that this was in addition to the XKCD).
- mmastrac 3y ago
  The smoking rates have halved since 2000 with no signs of slowing down. Subtle warnings do help.
  - 3y ago
harha_ 3y ago
I'm thankful that I quit social media 9 years ago.
- brtkdotse 3y ago
  I’d say that it’s not a social media per se, HN shares _a lot_ its of traits
- jsjshbrebj 3y ago
  you are literally posting on social media right now
- jacknobody 3y ago
  Me too, but... umm... HN?
  - jacknobody 3y ago
    Anywhere. Sorry, but people don't always understand and some die as a result. Maybe it should have been flagged for off-topic hopelessness.
speak_plainly 3y ago
"Simply telling people not to share certain types of content that could be harmful, dangerous or false will not be effective for habitual users, even if it works for nonhabitual users." It's pretty obvious that social media users create some pretty intense echo chambers. People are posting erroneous or incomplete information that aligns more with their feelings than with reality. Maybe what's driving people to become habitual users in the first place is a search for easy answers and their biases confirmed rather than just wanting to be part of a group. People want to be right and it seems they are willing to distort facts to do so and that creates a sort of contagion with the rest of the crowd searching for easy explanations for everything. But who knows. It's an interesting topic and I hope research continues.
brachika 3y ago
The best thing I did for my mental health was my gradual decline from interacting and using social networks. I was scrolling through my IG feed mad and jealous because people there seem to have a lot more going in live than I have, until by pure chance one girl who seemed the happiest person on her IG travels randomly outed herself to go to therapy for her depression and suicidal states. This happened almost 5 years ago, and I never looked back.
- tayo42 3y ago
  Alot of people use travel to try to fix their lives or escape their problems. It never works. Most people's travel isn't something to be jealous of anyway when you pry into it.
  - plonk 3y ago
    Travel did make me happier in the middle of a depression though. Doing it regularly is great for the mood.
  - aspyct 3y ago
    I do recommend a good, hard journey in your life though. Take your shoes, or a bicycle, and go somewhere. One week, two weeks. Enough to be tired and want to go back home really hard. Enough to have to deal with a problem without a credit card (good example: bike broke down 10 miles from the closest city, not a soul around to help you). But most importantly, enough to enjoy the moment despite the hardship. Once you discover that it is possible, that it is logical, then a new life awaits.
- deely3 3y ago
  For you, what is a main difference between social networks as facebook and HN?
  - lbhdc 3y ago
    Not the OP. I was thinking about this the other day in relation to social networks like Mastadon and Bluesky vs HN and Reddit. I have found Mastadon and things like it to not be sticky at all. I wanted to be involved in the community because it seems like its growing, but when I open the app nothing grabs my interest. I think it is because social networks like Mastadon, Bluesky, Twitter... are "people" or "stream of conscious" oriented, while sites like HN and Reddit are "topic" oriented. I am really interested in engaging with a topic, and want to read have have long conversations on that topic. However on "people" oriented networks there is no broad coherence to what people are talking about, and I lose interest
jacknobody 3y ago
Social media is about me feeling that what I say matters. Of course my opinion doesn't matter but that's beside the point. I can be brought to feel that my opinion matters. A worthwhile social activity is care for the needy. It actually generates love. No love is generated through social media. The problem isn't in the technology - it's in our silly idea that there's something better in the world than loving, and being loved.
- verisimi 3y ago
  > No love is generated through social media. Excellent - this expresses things so succinctly.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I agree. To put it another way, social media feeds the narcissist in each of us -- it's inward-focused -- when what we really need both as a society and individually to to be outward-focused. Individuals naturally feel that they are the most important person in the world. We are all the heroes of our own stories, after all, and experientially, the universe literally seems to revolve around us. We'd be better off engaging in activities that remind us that none of that is actually the case, and caring for others is an obvious way to do that. I think it's also why a very effective way of countering depression is to help others in a meaningful way.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    At the risk of sounding very much "kids these days", the concept of service seems to no longer be high on people's priorities. There's an art of making yourself better by making yourself small first and taking care of others.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      To be perfectly honest, I don't think that's a "kids these days" sort of thing. The concept of service has rarely been high on people's priorities outside of a major crisis or being part of a social group that values it highly and enforces it through peer pressure.
nologic01 3y ago
Social media dramatically increased political polarisation and in this way are quite literaly destroying society and the bonds and social contracts that keep people together. In contrast to their other engineered addictions my hunch is (with the caveat that I am not remotely a psychologist) that an important mechanism that enabled this regression was essentially incidental to the nature of these platforms: Normal people for the first time got a public podium (or they think they do) and thus behave as if the whole world is watching. Positions and arguments that earlier on were discussed in smaller and more forgiving circles are now in the open. People get trapped, have to defend a public record, they feel exposed, must double down. They seek comfort in similarly thinking corners, in newly formed clans, which are, as it happens, much easier to find online and encouraged by the algorithms of the platforms. The result is large numbers of people absorbed into toxic, self-generated and self-excited virtual realities. A social mechanism that was always active at a low level, but is now on steroids and out of control. This is just one of the traps: from selfies to influencers, from trolls to click farms the list goes on and on. The positive impact of "connecting people" is drowned in wave after wave of negative phenomena. If we ever get out of this era intact we'll think of it as a nightmare.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - pimlottc 3y ago
    Perhaps some people only develop such extreme anti-LGBT views because they don’t actually know or interact with any LGBT people
  - MockObject 3y ago
    Thank you for the example of the polarization we're decrying.
  - wussboy 3y ago
    The only reason the far-right exists as a thing in our present age, the only reason that you blame them for being the problem, the only reason you put yourself into that box and blame them is because of social media.
tiku 3y ago
Glad I've decided to delete it all. I notice that I still sometimes type "tw" to go to X.
MockObject 3y ago
Instagram seems to be intentionally interrupting this addiction by limiting the number of images shown for a hashtag to only NINE, instead of the infinite river they could be delivering.
- shmde 3y ago
  My drug dealer is limiting my meth supply to only 1 packet a day instead of letting me OD. Thank you dealer !
  - MockObject 3y ago
    Exactly. Why would a drug dealer do such a thing?
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  Because it's better for engagement to have 10x 9-image posts than to have a singular 90-image post.
  - MockObject 3y ago
    Really? It's more engaging to show nine than an endless river? I don't understand.
    - deafpolygon 3y ago
      [flagged]
biogene 3y ago
It's not just social media, its all discussion forums, (very much including HN) that has contributed to the polarization.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 01100011 3y ago
  Discussion forums, especially ones driven by moderation, seem to be controlled by a certain subset of the population. Software Engineers and other WFH types, folks without jobs, folks with strong opinions, or folks with nothing better to do in their freetime. If nothing else, this results in highly misleading feedback loops where outlier opinions and ideas are amplified and reinforced. Hang out in reddit for a while and you'd think the world was about to end(either from crime or rightwing hate groups depending on the subreddit). Go and talk to people in real life who don't hang out online and you will find that much of the hottest topics online barely register in most folks' thinking.
  - hifromLA 3y ago
    “Touch grass” as cliche as it has become is legitimately good advice. I’ve been heavily into gaming and internet culture since middle school and I could say for myself it’s one of my personal regrets in life.
  - dahwolf 3y ago
    Very insightful and I'd say this is true for the internet at large. Vocal internet is overly tech, overly American, overly progressive, overly academic, overly LGBTQ+, overly neuro-atypical, overly "misfit/alternative", overly chronically online. This interesting umbrella of demographics shapes internet culture with of course the sizable counter force of the right. This sub culture has somehow bled into media and institutions, becoming THE culture, but not really. Quite a lot of it makes zero sense to "normies". I once read a fascinating account of a campaign activist for the Democrats. She would do home visits to get a reading of people's political leaning and try to persuade them to vote for them. She was in for a shock. She found that people had no answer when probed for their position on seemingly important topics. They had simply never thought about it. Sometimes they do answer yet when probed for a "why", it soon turned out that they made it all up on the spot. And more often than not, the few answers given were contradicting and all over the place. Turns out it's all bread and games. People know and care about their immediate circles and don't do politics for the sake of politics unless their local lives are drastically impacted. Even "superior" online characters don't care about politics. They know what is the outrage of the day but wouldn't able to correctly answer the most basic of questions about politics. Yet the strength of their opinion seems inverse to that.
xkcd1963 3y ago
[flagged]
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
I feel attacked reading the headline. My friends and I all send each other the stupidest memes. There's 100% a daily need for memes from multiple accounts "content creator" wise. They need to be fresh too. I'm sure every 3-6 months we send each other a few duplicates but... it's more fun to laugh to yourself about something and then fire it off with the "share" button. Then your friends do the same back to you. Without it, I'd feel lonely lol
Animats 3y ago
Remember, sharing is spamming.
- deely3 3y ago
  HN is a spam site, noted.
  - drivers99 3y ago
    kuro5hin (K5) had a category called MLP (mindless link propagation) and it was a minority of the submissions. It’s interesting that site like Reddit and HN are primarily based on MLP, but K5 is long gone.
thomastjeffery 3y ago
People don't feel the difference between importance and engagement. Engagement is its own reward. People who feel engaged on a topic can reward themselves by simple repetition. They can skip the hard work of criticism, straight to the finish line. Importance is the result of active filtering. What is it that must be filtered out? Engagement. Who would truly want to filter out their own rewards? This is where we find a parallel with addiction: people who practice this short reward loop struggle to leave it, but people who don't practice tend to have an easy time avoiding the loop entirely.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
Hopefully this study by Wendy Wood and Ian Anderson is experimentally solid and replicates. If true it deals quite a blow to the plague of social media - one of the ugly faces of surveillance capitalism. If the more people engage the less value their engagement yields, that's a great natural feedback brake. It might seem like obvious attention dilution, but I think it counters the foundational 'scale' model of surveillance capitalism, eventually making the observed "choices" of users barely above the noise floor.
r3trohack3r 3y ago
I'm not sure I agree I agree with the premise here. Social networking was the high point of tech for me. And I think we are past that. Social networking appears to be dead, and it was replaced by social media. I'd say that social networking is good for our mental health and our communities. I'm not sure social media is. The last 10 years or so have proven to me that centralized social networking is not viable. It's not socially viable. It's not legally viable. And it's not economically viable. Centralized social networking failed. Social networking, to me, focused on staying connected with friends, family, communities, peers, etc. Social media, to me, feels a lot like taking randos on the internet and trying to make them famous in front of a bunch of other randos on the internet. The ultimate goal is to find the most engaging, socially/legally palatable, content and hype it up to as many people as possible. The ultimate goal being to create as much engagement as possible to keep people inside the social media experience long enough to effectively monetize them. You reward engaging content to encourage people to create it. Sometimes you share a portion of monetization back with the most engaging content creators. Other times, you reward engaging content with "internet points" that give people the warm fuzzies of "being liked." Sometimes you let creators sell their own advertisements to self-monetize the fame you've given them. But, ultimately, its about fueling an attention economy that is decoupled from our personal social networks. When your goal is to take randos on the internet and hype them, you're giving them "a platform" they wouldn't have otherwise. You have ethical/social/legal/moral questions about when it's appropriate to hype content and who you should or should not make famous. Not to mention you're pumping all that content _through your servers_. You have to pay for the storage and transmission of that content. You have to have conversations about your legal liability when it comes to that content. And I think this is where the recent social media "scandals" went off the rails. Many users thought they were on a social network. They thought they were sharing their content with their platforms. Platforms they built themselves in the real world. A social media app doesn't "give you a platform" with your grandma. You brought that platform to the social media app. So when the app starts talking about what you are allowed to say on "their platform" many people suddenly realized they didn't have their own platforms. Their communities, their families, their friends, their peers, their _own platform_, was handed over to this hype machine. Users thought they were posting content to share with their friends, family, etc. But what they were really doing was sending it all to "some dude in Palo Alto." It's weird that we have to have the conversations we do in our society around social media. It seems very unnatural to me. A byproduct of centralized social networking failing and growing into social media. Centralized systems are wrong for the kind of communication people thought they were engaged in. Centralized systems work really well for social media. They work very poorly for social networking.

If only there was a way to measure mindless sharing…

This is obviously a serious problem, but I hate the use of the word "compels" in the title. Social media does not compel people to share things. It encourages it by design, absolutely, but nobody is forced to share things. We should take it seriously, but not to the point where we eliminate any concept of human autonomy in the use of these platforms.

Pannoniae 3y ago
Yes, it compels.... Just like heroin compels you to get more heroin. You can argue that human autonomy also has a role in it, but someone's thinking is not entirely autonomous, especially when addicted to something. Social media is addictive, and to an extent forces you to share things about yourself (there are social consequences for not doing so. I personally don't give a fuck but not everyone chooses that decision)
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  > Yes, it compels.... Just like heroin compels you to get more heroin. This is an incredibly misleading comparison. Addiction is not a monolith, and there are degrees of addiction. If you cold turkey quit a serious heroin addiction, there's a serious chance you will die. That is absolutely never the case with social media addiction. There are always times when we act against our own best interest because our body seems to override our brain - I had ice cream last night that I knew was bad for me. That doesn't mean we're compelled, and it isn't sufficient to call something addiction. What you're doing here is the equivalent of invoking Nazis in an argument on the internet - going straight to "ITS LIKE HEROIN" for anything that be somewhat addictive is incredibly reductive and degrades the quality of what could otherwise be a useful conversation.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Addiction is not a monolith, and there are degrees of addiction There are also degrees of compulsion. The law compels me to adhere to a speed limit; that doesn't mean my reptilian brain flips out if I go 66. Within the context of discussing compulsive social media use described as addictive, arguing ad absurdum with reference to heroin isn't as simple as calling everything distasteful Nazi.
  - Pannoniae 3y ago
    Note that I didn't compare social media to heroin, I've just made a simile of how something can be addictive just like heroin. I didn't say it was similarly addictive, and I didn't even compare their addictiveness, the simile was used to illustrate the point on a non-controversial example (which everyone knows is very addictive) And yes, you are entirely right - sugar and other things in that ice cream create an addiction - this is why you had ice cream yesterday even though you knew you shouldn't have had it!
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    I think you're misreading the comment. They were comparing the mechanism of addictive compulsion, not the magnitude or the consequences.
  - koprulusector 3y ago
    I think you're missing the point of the comment you're replying to, and of the story as a whole. Yes, human beings have agency and are ultimately responsible and accountable for their decisions. Human beings, like all living organisms, are complex systems. Social media, marketers and advertisers, among others, regularly manipulate and abuse such systems. So, yes, while it is true that addiction is a spectrum, that spectrum applies to social media as much as it does with other addictions like sugar or amphetamines. What your argument does is absolve those attempting to abuse such organic, complex systems for their own gain, regardless of the harm it promotes or directly causes. EDIT: - Further, in case you're missing the peer reviewed, scientific studies of social media and addiction: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=scholarly+articles+social+media+addiction https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=scholarly+articles+soci...
- lr4444lr 3y ago
  Heroin isn't addictive because other addicts are convincing you to take it. We are a social animal in the sense that it's part of normal healthy functioning, and that isolation is considered a mode of torture. Social media is a means to connect people that is perfectly manageable if you're an intact person in the same sense that the telephone is a convenient eay to stay in touch. There is no safe dose of heroin to avoid addiction in a healthy person.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    This thread is really not about heroin, though. Take food as an example. A person can be addicted to food (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_addiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_addiction) but eating isn't otherwise necessarily unhealthy. A person may be "compelled" to take a certain action for many reasons; I fail to see how the use of that word in this title is wrong.
    - lr4444lr 3y ago
      The sine qua non of addiction is withdrawal symptoms, not compulsion. Social media isn't necessary if you have a productive social life replacement. There is no analog substitute for heroin.
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
        > The sine qua non of addiction is withdrawal symptoms, not compulsion. This statement refutes the idea that social media or food can possibly be addictive, yet there's this body of research for both which asserts they can be. At best, this is splitting hairs over the definition of addiction. Assuming that Something can be addictive, a person might be "compelled" to act by their addiction to Something.
hammock 3y ago
Compel has broader/more varied meaning than you are giving it. "His hunger compelled him to eat" is a perfectly reasonable use of the word
deafpolygon 3y ago
Compel is an apt word to use in this situation. Definition is: "force or oblige (someone) to do something" or "bring about (something) by the use of force or pressure" [Oxford Dictionary]. Social media can make people feel _obliged_ by social pressure to engage in the platform (via sharing or posting updates about their life to family members and/or friends). Addiction can also do the same thing, while others may be bored and scroll incessantly (they feel the need to stave off boredom). There is a myriad of reasons. I felt compelled to respond to your insistence that 'compel' was an incorrect word.

beauHD 3y ago

> After a time, habitual or frequent users become desensitized to positive feedback, such as likes and comments, from other users. I've noticed this personally. In my early social media days circa 2012, going viral with a post of mine evoked genuine gratefulness for the post and appreciation for how much reach it got. Now, going viral is just a habit. 10,000 likes, 1000 shares on Facebook is my new normal. It's not 'special' like it used to be. I still appreciate my viral posts, just not to the extent of my early social media days (this is probably because fewer people were on it in 2012).

xyst 3y ago
The dopamine hit from the like/share notification no longer hits like it did in 2012. Reminds me of drug addicts building tolerance and upping usage to get same “high”. Probably get the same feeling again if you hit 100K or 1M interactions Personally, haven’t cared since 2015. FB — stopped using for socials but use its marketplace for selling/buying. IG - keep an account but otherwise have stopped using it. Still use anonymous social media like HN or reddit. Although lately stick to the fediverse — mastodon, lemmy, and matrix.
- dingnuts 3y ago
  tbh I think admitting in public that you use mastodon or lemmy outs you as a fringe nut, just like using 4chan /pol/ does
  - Pannoniae 3y ago
    Is that a problem though? You'll filter the people you want to interact with, effectively. I'd personally probably talk more to someone who goes to /pol/ than someone who goes on IG and TikTok. If you say "I use mastodon" that also creates an in-group effect, anyone else who does the same or similar are more likely to hit you up with a conversation due to that fact :)
  - skyyler 3y ago
    What makes you say that? Most of my friend groups are migrating towards mastodon. I haven't noticed any political connotations.

deweywsu 3y ago

This really rings true. I think....hold on, I have to post something on Instagram.

xyst 3y ago

These companies have hired focus groups, marketing experts, psychologists, and countless design teams to get people hooked on their platform. Are we really surprised? Multimillion dollar team vs primitive brain of human. Many people bound to lose and fall through. I think the problem is rooted in a large swath of society growing up in isolation. The past few decades has seen a sharp rise in suburban or exurb living (living in isolation), car centric transportation (traveling in isolation), and social media (socializing in isolation). High levels of partisanship in the states as well is not a coincidence. We have generations of children growing up playing video games in the suburbs because that’s all you can do from the moment you are born to the day you become an adult (or get a car).

hooande 3y ago
> These companies have hired focus groups, marketing experts, psychologists, and countless design teams to get people hooked on their platform. Are we really surprised? I don't think that this is the problem. From what I know, hackernews doesn't hire any marketing experts, psychologists or focus groups. It doesn't even support images. I was more addicted to this site than any other, despite the lack of psychological tricks. And there are many sites that DO employ full psychological warfare teams that I completely ignore. Tinder seemed fully committed to forcing repetitive user engagement. And I dropped that site after about two days, psychologists or not. If all it took to force engagement was a certain list of UI tricks, every funded social site would be able to do it. I don't think there's a single root cause or an off switch for social media. This phenomenon is here to stay, for better or worse. I think that we will adapt as a species but there's no going back.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Endless A/B testing will climb up some peak in the landscape of human psychology; that you and I are on a different peak may help a bit, but there are ways to find other peaks and money to be made in the attempt. (I'm apparently on peak "Idle Game", and thus benefited greatly from the end of Flash browser games freeing me from that pointless waste of time).

psychphysic 3y ago

It's funny that we're so compelled to innumerate all the ways social media is toxic and not do anything about it. Yet Canada is considering printing individual warnings on cigarettes despite fully saturating understanding that smoking is bad. I'm fully with each and every tweet warning you "tweeting makes you a dickbag please reconsider"

trescenzi 3y ago
https://xkcd.com/481/ https://xkcd.com/481/
ben_w 3y ago
> I'm fully with each and every tweet warning you "tweeting makes you a dickbag please reconsider" I vaguely recall somewhere had a speech synthesiser read everyone's comments back at them before letting people post them. Someone un-ironically complained it made them "sound stupid". (I think it was YouTube? Not sure).
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  If this isn't real, I'd guess you're remembering the XKCD linked in a sibling comment to yours. I kinda like your version more. The XKCD version where the poster has an actual moment of introspective clarity doesn't make sense to my cynical mind.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    If it is me misremembering fiction as fact, it wouldn't be the first time… (Even if I do have a strong memory that this was in addition to the XKCD).
mmastrac 3y ago
The smoking rates have halved since 2000 with no signs of slowing down. Subtle warnings do help.
- 3y ago

harha_ 3y ago

I'm thankful that I quit social media 9 years ago.

brtkdotse 3y ago
I’d say that it’s not a social media per se, HN shares _a lot_ its of traits
jsjshbrebj 3y ago
you are literally posting on social media right now
jacknobody 3y ago
Me too, but... umm... HN?
- jacknobody 3y ago
  Anywhere. Sorry, but people don't always understand and some die as a result. Maybe it should have been flagged for off-topic hopelessness.

speak_plainly 3y ago

"Simply telling people not to share certain types of content that could be harmful, dangerous or false will not be effective for habitual users, even if it works for nonhabitual users." It's pretty obvious that social media users create some pretty intense echo chambers. People are posting erroneous or incomplete information that aligns more with their feelings than with reality. Maybe what's driving people to become habitual users in the first place is a search for easy answers and their biases confirmed rather than just wanting to be part of a group. People want to be right and it seems they are willing to distort facts to do so and that creates a sort of contagion with the rest of the crowd searching for easy explanations for everything. But who knows. It's an interesting topic and I hope research continues.

brachika 3y ago

The best thing I did for my mental health was my gradual decline from interacting and using social networks. I was scrolling through my IG feed mad and jealous because people there seem to have a lot more going in live than I have, until by pure chance one girl who seemed the happiest person on her IG travels randomly outed herself to go to therapy for her depression and suicidal states. This happened almost 5 years ago, and I never looked back.

tayo42 3y ago
Alot of people use travel to try to fix their lives or escape their problems. It never works. Most people's travel isn't something to be jealous of anyway when you pry into it.
- plonk 3y ago
  Travel did make me happier in the middle of a depression though. Doing it regularly is great for the mood.
- aspyct 3y ago
  I do recommend a good, hard journey in your life though. Take your shoes, or a bicycle, and go somewhere. One week, two weeks. Enough to be tired and want to go back home really hard. Enough to have to deal with a problem without a credit card (good example: bike broke down 10 miles from the closest city, not a soul around to help you). But most importantly, enough to enjoy the moment despite the hardship. Once you discover that it is possible, that it is logical, then a new life awaits.
deely3 3y ago
For you, what is a main difference between social networks as facebook and HN?
- lbhdc 3y ago
  Not the OP. I was thinking about this the other day in relation to social networks like Mastadon and Bluesky vs HN and Reddit. I have found Mastadon and things like it to not be sticky at all. I wanted to be involved in the community because it seems like its growing, but when I open the app nothing grabs my interest. I think it is because social networks like Mastadon, Bluesky, Twitter... are "people" or "stream of conscious" oriented, while sites like HN and Reddit are "topic" oriented. I am really interested in engaging with a topic, and want to read have have long conversations on that topic. However on "people" oriented networks there is no broad coherence to what people are talking about, and I lose interest

jacknobody 3y ago

Social media is about me feeling that what I say matters. Of course my opinion doesn't matter but that's beside the point. I can be brought to feel that my opinion matters. A worthwhile social activity is care for the needy. It actually generates love. No love is generated through social media. The problem isn't in the technology - it's in our silly idea that there's something better in the world than loving, and being loved.

verisimi 3y ago
> No love is generated through social media. Excellent - this expresses things so succinctly.
JohnFen 3y ago
I agree. To put it another way, social media feeds the narcissist in each of us -- it's inward-focused -- when what we really need both as a society and individually to to be outward-focused. Individuals naturally feel that they are the most important person in the world. We are all the heroes of our own stories, after all, and experientially, the universe literally seems to revolve around us. We'd be better off engaging in activities that remind us that none of that is actually the case, and caring for others is an obvious way to do that. I think it's also why a very effective way of countering depression is to help others in a meaningful way.
- gottorf 3y ago
  At the risk of sounding very much "kids these days", the concept of service seems to no longer be high on people's priorities. There's an art of making yourself better by making yourself small first and taking care of others.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    To be perfectly honest, I don't think that's a "kids these days" sort of thing. The concept of service has rarely been high on people's priorities outside of a major crisis or being part of a social group that values it highly and enforces it through peer pressure.

nologic01 3y ago

Social media dramatically increased political polarisation and in this way are quite literaly destroying society and the bonds and social contracts that keep people together. In contrast to their other engineered addictions my hunch is (with the caveat that I am not remotely a psychologist) that an important mechanism that enabled this regression was essentially incidental to the nature of these platforms: Normal people for the first time got a public podium (or they think they do) and thus behave as if the whole world is watching. Positions and arguments that earlier on were discussed in smaller and more forgiving circles are now in the open. People get trapped, have to defend a public record, they feel exposed, must double down. They seek comfort in similarly thinking corners, in newly formed clans, which are, as it happens, much easier to find online and encouraged by the algorithms of the platforms. The result is large numbers of people absorbed into toxic, self-generated and self-excited virtual realities. A social mechanism that was always active at a low level, but is now on steroids and out of control. This is just one of the traps: from selfies to influencers, from trolls to click farms the list goes on and on. The positive impact of "connecting people" is drowned in wave after wave of negative phenomena. If we ever get out of this era intact we'll think of it as a nightmare.

mschuster91 3y ago
[flagged]
- pimlottc 3y ago
  Perhaps some people only develop such extreme anti-LGBT views because they don’t actually know or interact with any LGBT people
- MockObject 3y ago
  Thank you for the example of the polarization we're decrying.
- wussboy 3y ago
  The only reason the far-right exists as a thing in our present age, the only reason that you blame them for being the problem, the only reason you put yourself into that box and blame them is because of social media.

tiku 3y ago

Glad I've decided to delete it all. I notice that I still sometimes type "tw" to go to X.

MockObject 3y ago

Instagram seems to be intentionally interrupting this addiction by limiting the number of images shown for a hashtag to only NINE, instead of the infinite river they could be delivering.

shmde 3y ago
My drug dealer is limiting my meth supply to only 1 packet a day instead of letting me OD. Thank you dealer !
- MockObject 3y ago
  Exactly. Why would a drug dealer do such a thing?
deafpolygon 3y ago
Because it's better for engagement to have 10x 9-image posts than to have a singular 90-image post.
- MockObject 3y ago
  Really? It's more engaging to show nine than an endless river? I don't understand.
  - deafpolygon 3y ago
    [flagged]

biogene 3y ago

It's not just social media, its all discussion forums, (very much including HN) that has contributed to the polarization.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
01100011 3y ago
Discussion forums, especially ones driven by moderation, seem to be controlled by a certain subset of the population. Software Engineers and other WFH types, folks without jobs, folks with strong opinions, or folks with nothing better to do in their freetime. If nothing else, this results in highly misleading feedback loops where outlier opinions and ideas are amplified and reinforced. Hang out in reddit for a while and you'd think the world was about to end(either from crime or rightwing hate groups depending on the subreddit). Go and talk to people in real life who don't hang out online and you will find that much of the hottest topics online barely register in most folks' thinking.
- hifromLA 3y ago
  “Touch grass” as cliche as it has become is legitimately good advice. I’ve been heavily into gaming and internet culture since middle school and I could say for myself it’s one of my personal regrets in life.
- dahwolf 3y ago
  Very insightful and I'd say this is true for the internet at large. Vocal internet is overly tech, overly American, overly progressive, overly academic, overly LGBTQ+, overly neuro-atypical, overly "misfit/alternative", overly chronically online. This interesting umbrella of demographics shapes internet culture with of course the sizable counter force of the right. This sub culture has somehow bled into media and institutions, becoming THE culture, but not really. Quite a lot of it makes zero sense to "normies". I once read a fascinating account of a campaign activist for the Democrats. She would do home visits to get a reading of people's political leaning and try to persuade them to vote for them. She was in for a shock. She found that people had no answer when probed for their position on seemingly important topics. They had simply never thought about it. Sometimes they do answer yet when probed for a "why", it soon turned out that they made it all up on the spot. And more often than not, the few answers given were contradicting and all over the place. Turns out it's all bread and games. People know and care about their immediate circles and don't do politics for the sake of politics unless their local lives are drastically impacted. Even "superior" online characters don't care about politics. They know what is the outrage of the day but wouldn't able to correctly answer the most basic of questions about politics. Yet the strength of their opinion seems inverse to that.

xkcd1963 3y ago

[flagged]

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

I feel attacked reading the headline. My friends and I all send each other the stupidest memes. There's 100% a daily need for memes from multiple accounts "content creator" wise. They need to be fresh too. I'm sure every 3-6 months we send each other a few duplicates but... it's more fun to laugh to yourself about something and then fire it off with the "share" button. Then your friends do the same back to you. Without it, I'd feel lonely lol

Animats 3y ago

Remember, sharing is spamming.

deely3 3y ago
HN is a spam site, noted.
- drivers99 3y ago
  kuro5hin (K5) had a category called MLP (mindless link propagation) and it was a minority of the submissions. It’s interesting that site like Reddit and HN are primarily based on MLP, but K5 is long gone.

thomastjeffery 3y ago

People don't feel the difference between importance and engagement. Engagement is its own reward. People who feel engaged on a topic can reward themselves by simple repetition. They can skip the hard work of criticism, straight to the finish line. Importance is the result of active filtering. What is it that must be filtered out? Engagement. Who would truly want to filter out their own rewards? This is where we find a parallel with addiction: people who practice this short reward loop struggle to leave it, but people who don't practice tend to have an easy time avoiding the loop entirely.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

Hopefully this study by Wendy Wood and Ian Anderson is experimentally solid and replicates. If true it deals quite a blow to the plague of social media - one of the ugly faces of surveillance capitalism. If the more people engage the less value their engagement yields, that's a great natural feedback brake. It might seem like obvious attention dilution, but I think it counters the foundational 'scale' model of surveillance capitalism, eventually making the observed "choices" of users barely above the noise floor.

r3trohack3r 3y ago

I'm not sure I agree I agree with the premise here. Social networking was the high point of tech for me. And I think we are past that. Social networking appears to be dead, and it was replaced by social media. I'd say that social networking is good for our mental health and our communities. I'm not sure social media is. The last 10 years or so have proven to me that centralized social networking is not viable. It's not socially viable. It's not legally viable. And it's not economically viable. Centralized social networking failed. Social networking, to me, focused on staying connected with friends, family, communities, peers, etc. Social media, to me, feels a lot like taking randos on the internet and trying to make them famous in front of a bunch of other randos on the internet. The ultimate goal is to find the most engaging, socially/legally palatable, content and hype it up to as many people as possible. The ultimate goal being to create as much engagement as possible to keep people inside the social media experience long enough to effectively monetize them. You reward engaging content to encourage people to create it. Sometimes you share a portion of monetization back with the most engaging content creators. Other times, you reward engaging content with "internet points" that give people the warm fuzzies of "being liked." Sometimes you let creators sell their own advertisements to self-monetize the fame you've given them. But, ultimately, its about fueling an attention economy that is decoupled from our personal social networks. When your goal is to take randos on the internet and hype them, you're giving them "a platform" they wouldn't have otherwise. You have ethical/social/legal/moral questions about when it's appropriate to hype content and who you should or should not make famous. Not to mention you're pumping all that content _through your servers_. You have to pay for the storage and transmission of that content. You have to have conversations about your legal liability when it comes to that content. And I think this is where the recent social media "scandals" went off the rails. Many users thought they were on a social network. They thought they were sharing their content with their platforms. Platforms they built themselves in the real world. A social media app doesn't "give you a platform" with your grandma. You brought that platform to the social media app. So when the app starts talking about what you are allowed to say on "their platform" many people suddenly realized they didn't have their own platforms. Their communities, their families, their friends, their peers, their _own platform_, was handed over to this hype machine. Users thought they were posting content to share with their friends, family, etc. But what they were really doing was sending it all to "some dude in Palo Alto." It's weird that we have to have the conversations we do in our society around social media. It seems very unnatural to me. A byproduct of centralized social networking failing and growing into social media. Centralized systems are wrong for the kind of communication people thought they were engaged in. Centralized systems work really well for social media. They work very poorly for social networking.