11 ms·

Facebook is bad for you: Get a life

142 points by chetanahuja 13y ago

zxcvvcxz 13y ago
Alright, here are my honest gripes with facebook: - Professional contacts. I can't share anything I consider "funny" (in the stupid, I'm-in-my-early-20s way) with friends because I have investors and recruiters and these other professional fucks ready to judge me. - I'm tired of seeing your achievements. God damn just wait until I get some, okay? I don't care if you just started med school and are posting pics of your doctor ceremony thing. I'm busy making crappy Android apps and trying to quit pornography... Can't exactly brag about that. - If I post something not cool or impressive, it dilutes my "brand". My reputation is important for getting laid. Therefore I don't post anything and keep my best photos up. - Speaking of getting laid, too much girl drama whenever I add them on facebook. I don't want you posting a photo of us together, because that sends the signal to other girls that I'm not available when I would definitely consider myself so. I also don't want pics of me and a bunch of my guy friends, because that's "gay" for not having girls in the group. - Constant reputation management. If I post anything, I need to be vigilant for a few days to make sure no stupid highschool friends post anything. - Fuck you for backpacking through Europe and taking photos of everything. - The chat generally only allows for simple and content-lacking conversations (because that's what state your brain is in as you browse FB). Doesn't anyone sit down once in a while and write out emails to those important to them? - Real-time status updates. "I don't want to see this" is my favorite feature of FB. - Feeling bad for less socially popular people. When the post an update and aren't getting any likes, I really want to click "like" to make them feel better, but then I remember that I'd look uncool for associating with them. - Advertisements. I almost feel sorry for FB, because unlike Google (who knows what I'm looking for), they don't have much to work with aside from looking at people instagramming their food or sharing links from news sites such as this one. As a result, their ads always suck. I actually don't mind well-targeted ads that I receive in my gmail inbox. In short, I hate everything about FB, and it makes me feel like a terrible person everytime I use it.
- threeseed 13y ago
  Facebook is merely a website for messaging and sharing photos. It is because of YOUR friends that you get the experience you do. So if you are having a poor experience then find better friends. Or remove them from your feed. Or setup groups so you can filter content better. But honestly the problem quite clearly is you. The immature use of the term 'gay' to be derogatory. The fact that you dismiss the uncool people in your group because of fear of what others will think. The anger you have towards people who are merely enjoying their possibly once in a life time trip. You sound like a terrible person in spite of Facebook not because of it.
  - psychotik 13y ago
    It's easy to judge, isn't it? It takes some courage to be honest and introspective, regardless of how you may judge the poster. What you say about this person says as much about you as it does about them.
    - threeseed 13y ago
      Can you show me at what point there was some actual evaluation of why he was doing the things he was ? Because sorry but I don't see anything courageous or introspective there. I just see a blind rant by somebody who clearly cares way too much about what his friends think.
      - mixmastamyk 13y ago
        He sounds young, and perhaps was a bit rude. In fact his second to last point was a turn-off for me. But, he made some valid points. I don't believe being excessively judgemental helps much. I did like your advice to find better friends, and lose the others.
      - Gigablah 13y ago
        I don't know if you should take his post at face value, seems like he's just describing an exaggerated persona to support his conclusion.
chetanahuja 13y ago
Note: Title is verbatim from the economist article.
chatman 13y ago
Dr. Stallman also reminds us that Facebook is bad. It doesn't respect the users and their freedom against mass surveillance. http://stallman.org/facebook.html http://stallman.org/facebook.html
- lukifer 13y ago
  Stallman's criticisms are accurate, but irrelevant. Real people tend to like and want the service that Facebook offers (frictionless connection to loved ones), and they deliver. Any anti-Facebook sentiment from the FOSS community that is not an attempt to create a free and humane disruption is merely wasted breath (or worse, an in-group shibboleth).
  - EliRivers 13y ago
    Real people Yes, because Stallman is fictional. I'm fictional. Anyone who isn't on Facebook doesn't count as a person.
  - shmerl 13y ago
    > that is not an attempt to create a free and humane disruption See https://diasporafoundation.org https://diasporafoundation.org
- jlas 13y ago
  The Dr. salutation threw me off, I don't think he's technically a doctor. However he has been awarded a bunch of honorary doctorates.
- smsm42 13y ago
  By now, it is pretty clear there's no freedom from mass surveillance, at least if you're living in the US and using telephones or the internet. So singling out facebook is useless - for any site, if they have any info on you, assume the government has it, and they don't need court order for it either, and they won't allow the site to tell you about it.
  - tjr 13y ago
keiferski 13y ago
Well that's funny, considering that I constantly meet cool people in person and then add them on Facebook to keep in touch. The constant "Facebook is evil" makes no sense to me, as it's the easiest way to keep in touch with a wide variety of people around the world. If I deleted my Facebook, I'd lose touch with dozens of people worldwide. Could I email them? Sure, but that's broken and impersonal.
- aylons 13y ago
  I think the problem relies on getting curated updates of other people's lives through Facebook. It gives a very biased impression on how life should be.
  - derwiki 13y ago
    I just made a Chrome extension to turn off Newfeed, partially inspired by this thread: https://github.com/derwiki/NoNewsIsGoodNews https://github.com/derwiki/NoNewsIsGoodNews
- EliRivers 13y ago
  Could I email them? Sure, but that's broken and impersonal. How much more personal can you get than one person writing a message specifically to one other person?
  - keiferski 13y ago
    Because I have to look up their email (jabberwocky586@yahoo.com) and deliberately send them an email length message. On Facebook, I see their real name, their photo, their about page, and various recent things about their life. If I want to talk to them, I tap the chat bar and say two words. Email is extremely cold and impersonal compared to Facebook chat. Most "normal" people don't use email outside of business or more specific uses.
    - EliRivers 13y ago
      Whereas to me, what you describe sounds fantastically superficial and impersonal, whereas in sending a personal eMail I've had to actually, deliberately think about my interaction with them. I suppose context goes a long way.
aylons 13y ago
Am I the only one who feels the same in technical forums or even in Hacker News? Of course people will talk about things they know (and I come here to see these), but I can't help but have a feeling that I don't know enough, or that I can't keep with the technology and knowledge. Or worse: that I can't even get a good grasp of established tech, or that I am not smart enough. At deeper levels, this probably relate to the "impostor syndrome"[1], as we compare our whole knowledge to a curated selection of every other person knownledge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
- jere 13y ago
  Nope. I feel like that every single day. But it's not necessarily a feeling you want to get rid of. If you're not surrounding yourself with daily reminders about what you don't know, what are you learning?
- mtrn 13y ago
  HN, proggit, /. are filters with more less connected (and great) communities. I often use HN/proggit search to just get a feeling for some tech, how people talk about it - it's very useful for me, more than FB.
- MarcScott 13y ago
  If I understand 25% of the links on the front page of HN (excluding links to the mainstream press) on any given day then I feel like a success. Each time I come here it feels like a learning journey. That's why I keep coming back.
- VLM 13y ago
  "I can't help but have a feeling that I don't know enough" Clicked on your profile, and you know Brazil (cool) FPGAs (cool) and EE stuff (cool). We have some common background (well, other than the Brazil thing). Observationally those subjects do not come up very much in the stereotypical HN "yet another coffeescript release" stories, but when those topics do come up, the discussion is interesting. I get a huge rush out of finding something new that I don't know anything about. Exactly like how I felt as a kid opening presents. Addictive.
tokenizer 13y ago
I don't have a facebook account, and I find the idea of using it for keeping in touch with past acquaintances not very alluring and frankly a diatribe. You're not supposed to focus so much on other people's lives. Instead of people growing into better people through self defined improvement, people now seek gratification through others and their acknowledgment. Instead of going to a concert with a few choice friends and living in the experience, some just anxiously try to record the moment, which has ironically been lost with the vision of the future. Don't ask me what the optimum amount of social contact and level is for a person, but suffice to say what people are currently doing is not it.
- andrewljohnson 13y ago
  It always surprises me how people are eager to project the foibles of people of all eras, onto modern technology. Suffice it to say that the right amount of social contact a person wants varies, and finding your place free of loneliness in society has been a challenge since well before Facebook.
  - tokenizer 13y ago
    I don't think so. Modern technology allows instant gratification for social contracts from anywhere in the world. It makes us more dependent on each other, and it also allows for long term storage when you then put this in junction with recording devices. You're right that people have also been widely varied in their preferences with social contact, but for lack of a better argument than an appeal to nature, this is different, and we don't know what the consequences are. At least the older ways of contacting people were time tested before the phone.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  """living in the experience, some just anxiously try to record the moment, which has ironically been lost with the vision of the future""" Louis CK illustrated something close : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpAwhSSe7F0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpAwhSSe7F0
  - 13y ago
progx 13y ago
Facebook is boring after so many years. The problem will be solved by itself.
caiob 13y ago
did the author say something we all didn't already know?
Carltonian 13y ago
Once the taboo of "I saw this person's update on Facebook, but I can't just jump into a conversation with them referencing that update without qualifying it with a: 'I saw your update on Facebook'" then Facebook will begin to advertise itself as timeshifting social interaction. You can "catch up" with your friends without having to actually talk to them. Here's one use case (sorry for anybody seeing me reference this car crash multiple times): I got in a car crash. If I had Facebook, I could have made a post about it and explained it once. I've explained what happened to 20 people it feels like, all of whom have Facebook. After the first few times of realizing I had basically drafted a script of the accident, I began not going into too much detail with everyone, only for them to ask more questions until I returned to the script. All-in-all though, timeshifting social interaction sounds really bad for everyone, but really good for increasing how much a single person can consume overall (which is again, probably bad for everyone).
andrewljohnson 13y ago
I bet the outcome of the study changes over time. Sure, Facebook can be a mean place, like the school playground, but you tune it out (both mentally and with software) over time. If you look at how national populations react to internet ads over time, behavior changes, and the same goes with Facebook. In the case of ads, people mostly just become desensitized, and I bet the same goes for the bile on Facebook. Not to mention how the website changes over time, in response to measured user behavior.
- silentOpen 13y ago
  Too bad Facebook actively punishes third-party client-side software distributions that modify its behavior or function according to user preferences.
wh-uws 13y ago
So how do you update or replace facebook with more meaningful interaction? And no snarky, just delete it, comments. I mean seriously? There are many people on my facebook whose content I consume but dont interact with. And I know that it happens to me as well and is where the loneliness comes from. How do you fix that without being creepy and showing all who've seen everything you post (which facebook tracks as it is surfaced in groups)?
- 1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
  I tend to invite people out for beers or coffee on occasion.
- tokenizer 13y ago
  Short answer? You appreciate context over content. Anything and everything can be content. But not everything can be contextually meaningful. Take what I had for diner. Should I post that on HN? Absolutely not. Not contextually relevant. What about a blog post on Angular JS modules? Now that makes sense. If facebook has a context like HN, or a meaningful way of identifying it like Reddit, then it has been lost on me. I mean, facebook's context is that it's an address book for your local social group right? So that must mean the context is contextually dependent on that right? I don't think that's 100% true. Facebook imparts it's own context. Which is basically sharing is caring. So it's context is basically content! Long answer? Not sure...
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    >>If facebook has a context like HN, or a meaningful way of identifying it like Reddit, then it has been lost on me. Facebook's context can be perfectly described using the idiom, "Keeping up with the Jonases." Just like people in real life try to impress their friends and coworkers with nice cars, big houses, fast motorcycles, shiny gadgets, etc. people on Facebook try to impress their Facebook friends with pretty pictures, funny videos, interesting articles, and clever status updates.
latifnanji27 13y ago
Sigh... The study is focused on teens and people in their young 20's - only 82 of them. How could that be enough data given that demographic has already been largely influenced these social networks while growing up? I'd be curious to see this study done on older more mature people.
mb_72 13y ago
Facebook is essential where I live (Estonia) for promoting the band I;m in, and for being hooked into music events. Back in my 'home' country (Australia), it's used less for this purpose, but it is still used this way. Like all tools - judge it's usefulness, and use it appropriately.
tsenkov 13y ago
I am not using Facebook for the last 2-3 months and I must say, it is a positive change in my live. Nevertheless, I would argue that the gain isn't measured in time - I think it's about the quality of the time spent. We need free time - its the best way to "always work by choice", isn't it? Having the "power" to start and stop whenever you want, is a smart trick to make your work a lot more satisfactory as a process. Maybe if I had this perfect discipline in me and I didn't need such psychological tricks to help me, I could be as efficient without any free time what so ever, who knows ... Yet as a regular human being, I need to feel free to work or not to. But to make the most of my free time I've decided to distil the choices how to spend it down to a "better" list, so I don't need to try ripping this "pleasure" out of my schedule. So I read random stuff, but on the top pages of Hacker News, I read random stuff but in my not-so-randomly selected list of blogs that I've subscribed or twitter feed, etc. At the end, it's the same time I am away from my work, but the quality of that time, measured as helpful information I've digested is substantially higher, at the same (often higher) level of delight.
FollowSteph3 13y ago
It's because you only see the highlights. And compounded it looks like everyone is traveling and so on when in fact if each one friend did at most one trip a year and you had 200 friends it would look like there are four trips each week. So you think people are traveling all the time, and so on.
shmerl 13y ago
* Social network - good. * Facebook - very bad implementation of the social network.
drinkzima 13y ago
Did I miss something or is there a massive correlation vs causation issue with this article? I actually agree with the premise, but I also know that my lowest-value, highest-boredom moments are spent on Facebook, so it seems like there could be a pretty large variable in the analysis that is getting ignored (underlying boredom levels).
volokoumphetico 13y ago
I've deactivated facebook permanently (I changed my password to something impossible to remember before deactivating). This works very well, since facebook is about having higher number of friends, when there's zero, there's no point in going back to it. It's value at one point was very high (when I could still tolerate the level of bullshit amongst my peers on fb; most are insecure little instagram addicts) but now it's worthless as I can never gain back some 300+ friends on FB. What's happening now is that I feel much more free. If someone is not there for you in real life to talk to face to face or on the phone once in a while, then I wouldn't have otherwise dealt with them but it was facebook that made all these uncessary contacts seem suddenly necessary, out of hoarding friends and contacts on FB to show other insecure FB friends that you are sociable and awesome. Now I chuckle whenever I hear some idiot snapping shots of their receipt or food, it's not the camera shutter, it's the sound of insecurity. However, I still keep my linkedin account because it's intrinsic value as a social network tool is immensely more valuable than sharing stupid cat videos and your "friends" who are nothing more than just a few rows of data stored somewhere by an entity trying to show the right ads for you to click on. They might as well tell people to start wearing tshirts that display ads that matches your previous staring habits (were you just checking that chick out, time to bombard you with dating site ads on your friends t-shirt!)
- briancaw2 13y ago
  I was off Facebook for a year and felt as free as you described. The problem is that girls use FB as a vetting tool. It's weird to not have FB and introduces a barrier to entry in the dating world (pun absolutely intended).
  - volokoumphetico 13y ago
    If she uses FB, I'd end the relationship right there. Other things include taking off heels during sex.
- Sam_Odio 13y ago
  > Now I chuckle whenever I hear some idiot snapping shots of their receipt or food, it's not the camera shutter, it's the sound of insecurity. It's common to take photos of receipts for business purposes. Is there a situation where that type of behavior indicates insecurity?
thenerdfiles 13y ago
Facebook needs community moderators, who can ban users from certain networks. Get creative about the job market.
cliveowen 13y ago
Am I going nuts or this is like the 5th or 6th article in a couple years that reports the same thing? Lately I feel like I'm living through a big deja-vu.
danneu 13y ago
Every time Facebook is brought up, some of us attempt to enumerate the reasons why we ostensibly hate Facebook. But frequently our list just looks like an inventory of our own self-limiting beliefs, bitterness, and narcissism. Perhaps we really hate Facebook so much because it so effortlessly unmasks us and our conflicts with the world. In an impressive dance of culpability evasion, we come here to re-convince ourselves that the deactivation button is a secret transcendental portal into social nirvana instead of acknowledging the possibility that the deactivation button is our only chance to turn the tides of a personal battle we are merely losing against ourselves.
- samstave 13y ago
  Funny how your comment comes across very similarly. "I have it together, and am so self-aware and capable of keeping a balance with my relationship to Facebook. I mean who are these losers that would have a problem with it? I am so much better than they, and I can still have my FB account as well!"
  - richardjordan 13y ago
    His comment didn't come across like that at all. He just pointed out that the bitterness and vitriol directed towards Facebook seems detached from the experience of folks who use it to keep in touch with family and friends quite happily.
    - samstave 13y ago
      If you re-read his comment, its filled with as much vitriol and bitterness.
      - danneu 13y ago
        I'm not trying to be hostile. I switched the pronouns to the first-person plural.
        13y ago
onedev 13y ago
Someone writes an article about Facebook being bad once every couple months....but more recently it's been more like once every couple of weeks.
cenhyperion 13y ago
Am I the only one that gets value out of facebook? It's a decent way to share the photographs I take and a pretty good way of organizing events with friends. That said, I almost never scroll through my feed as I don't get much value from it.
cenhyperion 13y ago
Am I the only one that gets value out of facebook? It's a decent way to share the photographs I take and a pretty good way of organizing events with friends. That said, I almost never scroll through my feed as I don't get much value from it.
richardjordan 13y ago
I don't get the griping over having to share stuff with people you don't want to - current second ranked comment complaining about professional contacts. There's no law that says you have to Facebook friend people. I make it clear there's a simple delineation - Facebook is for family and long established friends (going back to elementary level in some cases). LinkedIn is for professional contacts. I publish most things on Facebook for friends only or for public depending on audience. I don't need more granularity than those two options. Done. Now I get to keep in touch with old friends and family from all over the world and it makes me smile. It makes me happy to see them happy in their lives. You don't have to add people who aren't, like ya know, your friends to your Facebook friends list. If you are doing this you need to look at yourself not Facebook for failings.
vonskippy 13y ago
Before I yell "Get off my lawn", I'd like to remind what seems to be the main demographic here on HN (you know, the 20 something "me me me" short pants crowd) that people, businesses, start-ups, families, friends, entrepreneurs, new ideas, etc - all got along (and flourished) just fine before all this social media crap. So stop using the social media drivel, there's many better ways of staying in touch - none of which are facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc. Now get off my lawn.
techtalsky 13y ago
I guess I'm in the minority, but I genuinely enjoy Facebook. Sure, it has its annoyances, and ads are a much more prominent part of the experience. However, it lets me connect with my friends back in Seattle (I live in Brooklyn now) and gives me an outlet for cool photos of my life here in Brooklyn and fun stuff I'd like to share with my friends. I've built a reasonably fun little discussion group around my content and the content of my friends, and we all seem to have a fairly good time with it. I tried Twitter, G+, and everything else, but nothing gets as much "interesting discussion per post" except FB.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mccloy 13y ago
I'm no huge fan of facebook. But I'm less a fan of 'news' articles with sensational headlines that boil down to "The way it was was good, so new stuff must be bad." It's not hard to imagine (or find) similar articles about basically anything that's new and popular, especially when it happens to be popular with 'young' people. It seems to me that this article plays on the fact that most people prefer established norms over change, and most people glorify "how things were" in relation to "how things are". There's very little meaningful here, only link-bait.

142 points by chetanahuja 13y ago

Alright, here are my honest gripes with facebook: - Professional contacts. I can't share anything I consider "funny" (in the stupid, I'm-in-my-early-20s way) with friends because I have investors and recruiters and these other professional fucks ready to judge me. - I'm tired of seeing your achievements. God damn just wait until I get some, okay? I don't care if you just started med school and are posting pics of your doctor ceremony thing. I'm busy making crappy Android apps and trying to quit pornography... Can't exactly brag about that. - If I post something not cool or impressive, it dilutes my "brand". My reputation is important for getting laid. Therefore I don't post anything and keep my best photos up. - Speaking of getting laid, too much girl drama whenever I add them on facebook. I don't want you posting a photo of us together, because that sends the signal to other girls that I'm not available when I would definitely consider myself so. I also don't want pics of me and a bunch of my guy friends, because that's "gay" for not having girls in the group. - Constant reputation management. If I post anything, I need to be vigilant for a few days to make sure no stupid highschool friends post anything. - Fuck you for backpacking through Europe and taking photos of everything. - The chat generally only allows for simple and content-lacking conversations (because that's what state your brain is in as you browse FB). Doesn't anyone sit down once in a while and write out emails to those important to them? - Real-time status updates. "I don't want to see this" is my favorite feature of FB. - Feeling bad for less socially popular people. When the post an update and aren't getting any likes, I really want to click "like" to make them feel better, but then I remember that I'd look uncool for associating with them. - Advertisements. I almost feel sorry for FB, because unlike Google (who knows what I'm looking for), they don't have much to work with aside from looking at people instagramming their food or sharing links from news sites such as this one. As a result, their ads always suck. I actually don't mind well-targeted ads that I receive in my gmail inbox. In short, I hate everything about FB, and it makes me feel like a terrible person everytime I use it.

threeseed 13y ago
Facebook is merely a website for messaging and sharing photos. It is because of YOUR friends that you get the experience you do. So if you are having a poor experience then find better friends. Or remove them from your feed. Or setup groups so you can filter content better. But honestly the problem quite clearly is you. The immature use of the term 'gay' to be derogatory. The fact that you dismiss the uncool people in your group because of fear of what others will think. The anger you have towards people who are merely enjoying their possibly once in a life time trip. You sound like a terrible person in spite of Facebook not because of it.
- psychotik 13y ago
  It's easy to judge, isn't it? It takes some courage to be honest and introspective, regardless of how you may judge the poster. What you say about this person says as much about you as it does about them.
  - threeseed 13y ago
    Can you show me at what point there was some actual evaluation of why he was doing the things he was ? Because sorry but I don't see anything courageous or introspective there. I just see a blind rant by somebody who clearly cares way too much about what his friends think.
    - mixmastamyk 13y ago
      He sounds young, and perhaps was a bit rude. In fact his second to last point was a turn-off for me. But, he made some valid points. I don't believe being excessively judgemental helps much. I did like your advice to find better friends, and lose the others.
    - Gigablah 13y ago
      I don't know if you should take his post at face value, seems like he's just describing an exaggerated persona to support his conclusion.

chetanahuja 13y ago

Note: Title is verbatim from the economist article.

chatman 13y ago

Dr. Stallman also reminds us that Facebook is bad. It doesn't respect the users and their freedom against mass surveillance. http://stallman.org/facebook.html http://stallman.org/facebook.html

lukifer 13y ago
Stallman's criticisms are accurate, but irrelevant. Real people tend to like and want the service that Facebook offers (frictionless connection to loved ones), and they deliver. Any anti-Facebook sentiment from the FOSS community that is not an attempt to create a free and humane disruption is merely wasted breath (or worse, an in-group shibboleth).
- EliRivers 13y ago
  Real people Yes, because Stallman is fictional. I'm fictional. Anyone who isn't on Facebook doesn't count as a person.
- shmerl 13y ago
  > that is not an attempt to create a free and humane disruption See https://diasporafoundation.org https://diasporafoundation.org
jlas 13y ago
The Dr. salutation threw me off, I don't think he's technically a doctor. However he has been awarded a bunch of honorary doctorates.
smsm42 13y ago
By now, it is pretty clear there's no freedom from mass surveillance, at least if you're living in the US and using telephones or the internet. So singling out facebook is useless - for any site, if they have any info on you, assume the government has it, and they don't need court order for it either, and they won't allow the site to tell you about it.
- tjr 13y ago

keiferski 13y ago

Well that's funny, considering that I constantly meet cool people in person and then add them on Facebook to keep in touch. The constant "Facebook is evil" makes no sense to me, as it's the easiest way to keep in touch with a wide variety of people around the world. If I deleted my Facebook, I'd lose touch with dozens of people worldwide. Could I email them? Sure, but that's broken and impersonal.

aylons 13y ago
I think the problem relies on getting curated updates of other people's lives through Facebook. It gives a very biased impression on how life should be.
- derwiki 13y ago
  I just made a Chrome extension to turn off Newfeed, partially inspired by this thread: https://github.com/derwiki/NoNewsIsGoodNews https://github.com/derwiki/NoNewsIsGoodNews
EliRivers 13y ago
Could I email them? Sure, but that's broken and impersonal. How much more personal can you get than one person writing a message specifically to one other person?
- keiferski 13y ago
  Because I have to look up their email (jabberwocky586@yahoo.com) and deliberately send them an email length message. On Facebook, I see their real name, their photo, their about page, and various recent things about their life. If I want to talk to them, I tap the chat bar and say two words. Email is extremely cold and impersonal compared to Facebook chat. Most "normal" people don't use email outside of business or more specific uses.
  - EliRivers 13y ago
    Whereas to me, what you describe sounds fantastically superficial and impersonal, whereas in sending a personal eMail I've had to actually, deliberately think about my interaction with them. I suppose context goes a long way.

aylons 13y ago

Am I the only one who feels the same in technical forums or even in Hacker News? Of course people will talk about things they know (and I come here to see these), but I can't help but have a feeling that I don't know enough, or that I can't keep with the technology and knowledge. Or worse: that I can't even get a good grasp of established tech, or that I am not smart enough. At deeper levels, this probably relate to the "impostor syndrome"[1], as we compare our whole knowledge to a curated selection of every other person knownledge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

jere 13y ago
Nope. I feel like that every single day. But it's not necessarily a feeling you want to get rid of. If you're not surrounding yourself with daily reminders about what you don't know, what are you learning?
mtrn 13y ago
HN, proggit, /. are filters with more less connected (and great) communities. I often use HN/proggit search to just get a feeling for some tech, how people talk about it - it's very useful for me, more than FB.
MarcScott 13y ago
If I understand 25% of the links on the front page of HN (excluding links to the mainstream press) on any given day then I feel like a success. Each time I come here it feels like a learning journey. That's why I keep coming back.
VLM 13y ago
"I can't help but have a feeling that I don't know enough" Clicked on your profile, and you know Brazil (cool) FPGAs (cool) and EE stuff (cool). We have some common background (well, other than the Brazil thing). Observationally those subjects do not come up very much in the stereotypical HN "yet another coffeescript release" stories, but when those topics do come up, the discussion is interesting. I get a huge rush out of finding something new that I don't know anything about. Exactly like how I felt as a kid opening presents. Addictive.

tokenizer 13y ago

I don't have a facebook account, and I find the idea of using it for keeping in touch with past acquaintances not very alluring and frankly a diatribe. You're not supposed to focus so much on other people's lives. Instead of people growing into better people through self defined improvement, people now seek gratification through others and their acknowledgment. Instead of going to a concert with a few choice friends and living in the experience, some just anxiously try to record the moment, which has ironically been lost with the vision of the future. Don't ask me what the optimum amount of social contact and level is for a person, but suffice to say what people are currently doing is not it.

andrewljohnson 13y ago
It always surprises me how people are eager to project the foibles of people of all eras, onto modern technology. Suffice it to say that the right amount of social contact a person wants varies, and finding your place free of loneliness in society has been a challenge since well before Facebook.
- tokenizer 13y ago
  I don't think so. Modern technology allows instant gratification for social contracts from anywhere in the world. It makes us more dependent on each other, and it also allows for long term storage when you then put this in junction with recording devices. You're right that people have also been widely varied in their preferences with social contact, but for lack of a better argument than an appeal to nature, this is different, and we don't know what the consequences are. At least the older ways of contacting people were time tested before the phone.
agumonkey 13y ago
"""living in the experience, some just anxiously try to record the moment, which has ironically been lost with the vision of the future""" Louis CK illustrated something close : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpAwhSSe7F0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpAwhSSe7F0
- 13y ago

progx 13y ago

Facebook is boring after so many years. The problem will be solved by itself.

caiob 13y ago

did the author say something we all didn't already know?

Carltonian 13y ago

Once the taboo of "I saw this person's update on Facebook, but I can't just jump into a conversation with them referencing that update without qualifying it with a: 'I saw your update on Facebook'" then Facebook will begin to advertise itself as timeshifting social interaction. You can "catch up" with your friends without having to actually talk to them. Here's one use case (sorry for anybody seeing me reference this car crash multiple times): I got in a car crash. If I had Facebook, I could have made a post about it and explained it once. I've explained what happened to 20 people it feels like, all of whom have Facebook. After the first few times of realizing I had basically drafted a script of the accident, I began not going into too much detail with everyone, only for them to ask more questions until I returned to the script. All-in-all though, timeshifting social interaction sounds really bad for everyone, but really good for increasing how much a single person can consume overall (which is again, probably bad for everyone).

andrewljohnson 13y ago

I bet the outcome of the study changes over time. Sure, Facebook can be a mean place, like the school playground, but you tune it out (both mentally and with software) over time. If you look at how national populations react to internet ads over time, behavior changes, and the same goes with Facebook. In the case of ads, people mostly just become desensitized, and I bet the same goes for the bile on Facebook. Not to mention how the website changes over time, in response to measured user behavior.

silentOpen 13y ago
Too bad Facebook actively punishes third-party client-side software distributions that modify its behavior or function according to user preferences.

wh-uws 13y ago

So how do you update or replace facebook with more meaningful interaction? And no snarky, just delete it, comments. I mean seriously? There are many people on my facebook whose content I consume but dont interact with. And I know that it happens to me as well and is where the loneliness comes from. How do you fix that without being creepy and showing all who've seen everything you post (which facebook tracks as it is surfaced in groups)?

1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
I tend to invite people out for beers or coffee on occasion.
tokenizer 13y ago
Short answer? You appreciate context over content. Anything and everything can be content. But not everything can be contextually meaningful. Take what I had for diner. Should I post that on HN? Absolutely not. Not contextually relevant. What about a blog post on Angular JS modules? Now that makes sense. If facebook has a context like HN, or a meaningful way of identifying it like Reddit, then it has been lost on me. I mean, facebook's context is that it's an address book for your local social group right? So that must mean the context is contextually dependent on that right? I don't think that's 100% true. Facebook imparts it's own context. Which is basically sharing is caring. So it's context is basically content! Long answer? Not sure...
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  >>If facebook has a context like HN, or a meaningful way of identifying it like Reddit, then it has been lost on me. Facebook's context can be perfectly described using the idiom, "Keeping up with the Jonases." Just like people in real life try to impress their friends and coworkers with nice cars, big houses, fast motorcycles, shiny gadgets, etc. people on Facebook try to impress their Facebook friends with pretty pictures, funny videos, interesting articles, and clever status updates.

latifnanji27 13y ago

Sigh... The study is focused on teens and people in their young 20's - only 82 of them. How could that be enough data given that demographic has already been largely influenced these social networks while growing up? I'd be curious to see this study done on older more mature people.

mb_72 13y ago

Facebook is essential where I live (Estonia) for promoting the band I;m in, and for being hooked into music events. Back in my 'home' country (Australia), it's used less for this purpose, but it is still used this way. Like all tools - judge it's usefulness, and use it appropriately.

tsenkov 13y ago

I am not using Facebook for the last 2-3 months and I must say, it is a positive change in my live. Nevertheless, I would argue that the gain isn't measured in time - I think it's about the quality of the time spent. We need free time - its the best way to "always work by choice", isn't it? Having the "power" to start and stop whenever you want, is a smart trick to make your work a lot more satisfactory as a process. Maybe if I had this perfect discipline in me and I didn't need such psychological tricks to help me, I could be as efficient without any free time what so ever, who knows ... Yet as a regular human being, I need to feel free to work or not to. But to make the most of my free time I've decided to distil the choices how to spend it down to a "better" list, so I don't need to try ripping this "pleasure" out of my schedule. So I read random stuff, but on the top pages of Hacker News, I read random stuff but in my not-so-randomly selected list of blogs that I've subscribed or twitter feed, etc. At the end, it's the same time I am away from my work, but the quality of that time, measured as helpful information I've digested is substantially higher, at the same (often higher) level of delight.

FollowSteph3 13y ago

It's because you only see the highlights. And compounded it looks like everyone is traveling and so on when in fact if each one friend did at most one trip a year and you had 200 friends it would look like there are four trips each week. So you think people are traveling all the time, and so on.

shmerl 13y ago

* Social network - good. * Facebook - very bad implementation of the social network.

drinkzima 13y ago

Did I miss something or is there a massive correlation vs causation issue with this article? I actually agree with the premise, but I also know that my lowest-value, highest-boredom moments are spent on Facebook, so it seems like there could be a pretty large variable in the analysis that is getting ignored (underlying boredom levels).

volokoumphetico 13y ago

I've deactivated facebook permanently (I changed my password to something impossible to remember before deactivating). This works very well, since facebook is about having higher number of friends, when there's zero, there's no point in going back to it. It's value at one point was very high (when I could still tolerate the level of bullshit amongst my peers on fb; most are insecure little instagram addicts) but now it's worthless as I can never gain back some 300+ friends on FB. What's happening now is that I feel much more free. If someone is not there for you in real life to talk to face to face or on the phone once in a while, then I wouldn't have otherwise dealt with them but it was facebook that made all these uncessary contacts seem suddenly necessary, out of hoarding friends and contacts on FB to show other insecure FB friends that you are sociable and awesome. Now I chuckle whenever I hear some idiot snapping shots of their receipt or food, it's not the camera shutter, it's the sound of insecurity. However, I still keep my linkedin account because it's intrinsic value as a social network tool is immensely more valuable than sharing stupid cat videos and your "friends" who are nothing more than just a few rows of data stored somewhere by an entity trying to show the right ads for you to click on. They might as well tell people to start wearing tshirts that display ads that matches your previous staring habits (were you just checking that chick out, time to bombard you with dating site ads on your friends t-shirt!)

briancaw2 13y ago
I was off Facebook for a year and felt as free as you described. The problem is that girls use FB as a vetting tool. It's weird to not have FB and introduces a barrier to entry in the dating world (pun absolutely intended).
- volokoumphetico 13y ago
  If she uses FB, I'd end the relationship right there. Other things include taking off heels during sex.
Sam_Odio 13y ago
> Now I chuckle whenever I hear some idiot snapping shots of their receipt or food, it's not the camera shutter, it's the sound of insecurity. It's common to take photos of receipts for business purposes. Is there a situation where that type of behavior indicates insecurity?

thenerdfiles 13y ago

Facebook needs community moderators, who can ban users from certain networks. Get creative about the job market.

cliveowen 13y ago

Am I going nuts or this is like the 5th or 6th article in a couple years that reports the same thing? Lately I feel like I'm living through a big deja-vu.

danneu 13y ago

Every time Facebook is brought up, some of us attempt to enumerate the reasons why we ostensibly hate Facebook. But frequently our list just looks like an inventory of our own self-limiting beliefs, bitterness, and narcissism. Perhaps we really hate Facebook so much because it so effortlessly unmasks us and our conflicts with the world. In an impressive dance of culpability evasion, we come here to re-convince ourselves that the deactivation button is a secret transcendental portal into social nirvana instead of acknowledging the possibility that the deactivation button is our only chance to turn the tides of a personal battle we are merely losing against ourselves.

samstave 13y ago
Funny how your comment comes across very similarly. "I have it together, and am so self-aware and capable of keeping a balance with my relationship to Facebook. I mean who are these losers that would have a problem with it? I am so much better than they, and I can still have my FB account as well!"
- richardjordan 13y ago
  His comment didn't come across like that at all. He just pointed out that the bitterness and vitriol directed towards Facebook seems detached from the experience of folks who use it to keep in touch with family and friends quite happily.
  - samstave 13y ago
    If you re-read his comment, its filled with as much vitriol and bitterness.
    - danneu 13y ago
      I'm not trying to be hostile. I switched the pronouns to the first-person plural.
      - 13y ago

onedev 13y ago

Someone writes an article about Facebook being bad once every couple months....but more recently it's been more like once every couple of weeks.

cenhyperion 13y ago

Am I the only one that gets value out of facebook? It's a decent way to share the photographs I take and a pretty good way of organizing events with friends. That said, I almost never scroll through my feed as I don't get much value from it.

cenhyperion 13y ago

richardjordan 13y ago

I don't get the griping over having to share stuff with people you don't want to - current second ranked comment complaining about professional contacts. There's no law that says you have to Facebook friend people. I make it clear there's a simple delineation - Facebook is for family and long established friends (going back to elementary level in some cases). LinkedIn is for professional contacts. I publish most things on Facebook for friends only or for public depending on audience. I don't need more granularity than those two options. Done. Now I get to keep in touch with old friends and family from all over the world and it makes me smile. It makes me happy to see them happy in their lives. You don't have to add people who aren't, like ya know, your friends to your Facebook friends list. If you are doing this you need to look at yourself not Facebook for failings.

vonskippy 13y ago

Before I yell "Get off my lawn", I'd like to remind what seems to be the main demographic here on HN (you know, the 20 something "me me me" short pants crowd) that people, businesses, start-ups, families, friends, entrepreneurs, new ideas, etc - all got along (and flourished) just fine before all this social media crap. So stop using the social media drivel, there's many better ways of staying in touch - none of which are facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc. Now get off my lawn.

techtalsky 13y ago

I guess I'm in the minority, but I genuinely enjoy Facebook. Sure, it has its annoyances, and ads are a much more prominent part of the experience. However, it lets me connect with my friends back in Seattle (I live in Brooklyn now) and gives me an outlet for cool photos of my life here in Brooklyn and fun stuff I'd like to share with my friends. I've built a reasonably fun little discussion group around my content and the content of my friends, and we all seem to have a fairly good time with it. I tried Twitter, G+, and everything else, but nothing gets as much "interesting discussion per post" except FB.

deleted 13y ago

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mccloy 13y ago

I'm no huge fan of facebook. But I'm less a fan of 'news' articles with sensational headlines that boil down to "The way it was was good, so new stuff must be bad." It's not hard to imagine (or find) similar articles about basically anything that's new and popular, especially when it happens to be popular with 'young' people. It seems to me that this article plays on the fact that most people prefer established norms over change, and most people glorify "how things were" in relation to "how things are". There's very little meaningful here, only link-bait.