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Facebook use linked to depressive symptoms

225 points by alexcasalboni 12y ago

TuxMulder 12y ago
I think it's quite easy to neglect your own highlights reel and forget the good things you have going on in your own life. Made even more difficult if you don't actually post to facebook. Ultimately though, everyone's life has ups and downs; people tend to cherry pick the ups when posting to facebook, which is certainly worth remembering if you spend long periods of time on there obsessing over how much better other peoples' lives seem to be.
weisser 12y ago
I think most people realize this anecdotally but the switching costs are too high for many to remove themselves. Personally, I have many connections exclusively only on FB - I don't have their emails, phone numbers, etc - that I remain on FB only to be able to message them. I wish I could automatically message them and easily collect their email/phone #s with minimal effort...probably a way but I haven't looked into it.
- ZenoArrow 12y ago
  "I wish I could automatically message them and easily collect their email/phone #s with minimal effort...probably a way but I haven't looked into it." Have you considered asking for their email address? Could send them a private message on Facebook saying you're considering leaving Facebook but would still like to keep in touch. I imagine most people would be fine with sharing their email address if they've already linked up with you on Facebook.
spiritplumber 12y ago
I get depressed reading HN because a lot of the stories are about people my age who are making a lot more money than me. Then I tell myself that they probably haven't saved as many lives as I have. Then I have to tell myself that this doesn't pay the bills, dammit. HN/slashdot/FB in moderation, kids! Now you know and knowing is half the battle.
- NietTim 12y ago
  There's more to life then making money! Perhaps they have a terrible social life and you are doing much better. Work to live, don't live to work But yeah, I know that feeling.
- _cudgel 12y ago
  I would encourage you to read this: https://medium.com/matter/the-shut-in-economy-ec3ec1294816 https://medium.com/matter/the-shut-in-economy-ec3ec1294816 I suspect these people your age making a lot more money lead lives similar to what's described in this article. These do not seem like happy lives to me! If you're actively saving lives, that is more valuable than all the money in the world, and I thank you.
  - plongeur 12y ago
    To react to other people's portrayed successfulness with doubting the legitimacy or their honesty and suspecting those people to be actually unhappy is almost as immature as getting depressed by it.
- interdrift 12y ago
  Whenever I get those kind of thoughts I remember that the last thought I will have on my death bed will be : what good did I leave to this world?
- mibbitirc 12y ago
  Make sure you read all the news stories about rich people who are depressed, and have horrible lives. Probably a lot more common than you think.
  - philh 12y ago
    Pretty sure poor people are more likely to be depressed and have horrible lives than rich people.
    - tamebadger 12y ago
NietTim 12y ago
One thing that has always stuck with me is the phrase "Facebook is only a collection of the highlights in someones life". Most people only post the positive stuff about their lives to facebook, which makes their lives look way more awesome then they probably are.
- TheBeardKing 12y ago
  Is it the highlights of their life? Or is it 80% politically biased news stories, pinterest desires, funny videos and pictures, complaints about random encounters with people, and lots of "This"ing?
- theorique 12y ago
  You also get those people who post everything that's going wrong, hoping to elicit sympathy or attention.
sparaker 12y ago
Stalking often could make you feel depressed. But facebook in my case helped me meet with very old friends without any effort so thats a plus.
dang 12y ago
"Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside."
- NoGravitas 12y ago
  "Compare the best of how they look to the worst of how you are; you won't win." ~ Morrissey
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
mbrock 12y ago
I'm pretty skeptical about the explanatory value of the "highlights reel" theory. Anecdotally, most of what I see on Facebook is people sharing links to stuff, liking posts by public pages, saying happy birthday, and so on. Couldn't it just be that, uh, Facebook is kinda boring? Or, as the article mentions, that "depressed feelings and lots of time on Facebook [...] go hand in hand," in other words, lonely/isolated people habitually look for connection on social media, but the kinds of communication that happen there are not very interesting or loneliness-assuaging. David Foster Wallace's 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram" describes a similar tendency but with television as the substituting technology: "Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S. six hours a day. The lonely, like the fictional, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today social and support groups for persons with precisely these features. Lonely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let's call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase just loathes the strain of the self-consciousness which so oddly seems to appear only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear to watchers. He sits out the stressful U.S. game of appearance poker. "But lonely people, home, alone, still crave sights and scenes. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them, on the screen; They remain blind to Joe. It's almost like voyeurism."
- scribu 12y ago
  > Joe Briefcase just loathes the strain of the self-consciousness which so oddly seems to appear only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear to watchers. That's called social anxiety, just FYI. And yeah, it's plausible that people which have social anxiety are more prone to overusing social media etc.
  - mbrock 12y ago
    Yeah, I guess. A study cited on Wikipedia claims that around 18% of American adults have some kind of social anxiety disorder, that is, chronic and debilitating forms of social anxiety. Of course, nearly everyone experiences social anxiety from time to time.
shubb 12y ago
Totally unsurprised - Unhealthy levels of facebook use, particularly apparent addiction to those annoying invite games are pretty obviously not the behavior of a happy person. When ever I get a slew of invites to Candy Crush or similar, it's always from someone a bit tragic. I mean, who else has the time to sit at home playing Facebook games, but the lack of motivation to go and do something more worthwhile?
- pizza234 12y ago
  I agree with the first statement, but this: > I mean, who else has the time to sit at home playing Facebook games, but the lack of motivation to go and do something more worthwhile? Is a bit more complicated. On a broader perspective, this pattern usage of Facebook is entertainment exactly like watching TV is (you even get the ads!). Considering that, based on the first statistic I've found on Google [0], the average American spends hours every day in front of a TV (even if not 5, 3/4 would be alarming), then there is a social problem, more than an individual one.
  - corin_ 12y ago
    I'm probably not an average person (nor am I American), but my TV "average" is higher than actual pure TV watching. For example I could spend 8 hours with a friend, drinking some wine, chatting, with the TV on - paying attention to it at times, at others ignoring it. In terms of "how much do you watch TV" my total viewing time just went up 8 hours, but it was 8 hours of background for a night catching up with a friend, not 8 hours for the sake of passive consumption. Equally, I'll often put easy-watching TV on when I'm at home but doing something else - working on my laptop, text-chatting to friends on Skype/WhatsApp, browsing sites like Hacker News. Again, this would raise my average, but it's not quite the same as going "what am I doing tonight? Watching the TV and nothing else" if the TV is getting a small fraction of my attention. I just wonder to what extent this sort of half-watching increases averages, or on the flip side to what extent high-sounding averages are genuinely worrying.
  - VLM 12y ago
    Averages mean something on a well defined graph, like a bell curve, especially with some extra numbers like std deviation. I find it nearly impossible to find a percentile graph of something like hours viewed along Y-axis and percentile population along the X. An excellent startup idea would be the very hard task of a search engine that can find graphs of a given X vs Y. Anyway, based on what little I can find, TV watching is absolutely not a bell curve as "young people" average only 2 or so hours per day and the elderly average over a working day per day (in excess of 8 hours per day of TV over 60 years old). My strong suspicion is TV viewership is strongly exponential vs percentile with "people in trouble" (medical problems, hospital patients, severely handicapped, addicts, prisoners) recording 24 hours/day or at least all 18 or so waking hours as viewing time, vs the majority the population in a declining exponential graph dropping to almost zero. Given a population distribution like that, an average is fairly meaningless when trying to draw cultural conclusions. Its like using average income or average wealth to draw economic conclusions. Or doing ergonomic design based on the average number of heads being well above one (think of Siamese twins). What cultural conclusions can you make about my typical normal lifestyle based on the average number of space qualified astronauts in my country? It is not a completely useless statistic, if the average TV draws a kilowatt then given a billion random people the electrical load due to TVs would be about 5 billion kilowatt-hours per day (5 TWh?). But the usefulness of the numbers break down when zoomed in.
onion2k 12y ago
Spending too much time comparing yourself to other people is depressing regardless of the media you use; someone who only reads biographies of wildly successful people will end up just as depressed as someone who spends too much time reading the edited highlights of lives on Facebook. To that end, this doesn't really have anything to do with Facebook. The medium is not the message.
- mbrock 12y ago
  More or less depressed than someone reading biographies of people in poverty and distress? Are people happier when their Facebook feeds contain more complaining? I'd guess that the "envy" effect is pretty marginal. "High levels of Facebook use" sounds to me about the same as "high levels of nail biting" or "high levels of watching cable TV." It's bored, nervous, pseudo-socializing, fruitless activity.
  - spacemanmatt 12y ago
    Can't strictly agree to pseudo-socializing or fruitless. Online conversations have continued offline. Those were actual people I was talking to. Those conversations resume online, often enough. It's part of the fabric. An invitation to an actual event with actual people received on facebook, because of activity or exposure there, is not fruitless activity. But it is usually a bored, nervous activity. I can handily agree to that part.
    - mbrock 12y ago
      Yeah, I'm not trying to say it's all like that.
  - onion2k 12y ago
    What it "sounds like" to you is just speculation, and to that end it isn't useful. The paper in the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal and is based on a proper scientific methodology and a pair of psychological studies. The outcome of the studies could be misunderstood but there at least appears to be some evidence for the author's conclusion.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
What's if it's the other way around? People prone to depression hanging on social media more.
- jon-wood 12y ago
  This sounds far more likely to me. If I'm having a crap time and have no energy I'm far more likely to passively consume Facebook than I am to actually leave the house and see somebody.
collyw 12y ago
For me it works the other way. If I have something interesting and creative to work on, forget Facebook I'll get absorbed in my work. If I am back to fixing the same dumb errors in users excel spreadsheets, then I get kind of pissed off (having complained to management that it is a crap solution to the problem many times). I become unenthusiastic and end up checking Facebook a lot more regularly.
alenmilk 12y ago
Social comparison is an old problem. Facebook is effective at spreading information thus amplifying the problem for those susceptible.
timepiece 12y ago
What about Twitter and reading the news from Russia Today and trolling people on Fox News related pages?
nullc 12y ago
Well, duh, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/03/sheryl-sandberg-not-sorry-for-facebook-mood-manipulation-study/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/03... More seriously, depression is linked to compulsive purchases. Now I'm not saying that they're intentionally adopting features and styles that depress their users, but should they stumble into one by chance fixing will hurt revenues. What outcome should we expect? Fear powerful optimization processes. Harm to mankind from inhuman intelligences doesn't require fancy AI: in the halls of the corporate Chinese room surprising behavior can arise just as well from complexity systems which are ultimately made of meat.
- zamalek 12y ago
  > More seriously, depression is linked to compulsive purchases. I think in the case of Facebook it's that you are the product, more specifically: your emotions are the product. You get other stereotypes but by-and-large the most well known stereotype on Facebook is someone who shares all their emotions. Facebook even encourages it: now in a relationship, married, divorced, broke up, etc. Relationships aren't "official" until they are "Facebook official." Your emotional drama is what shows up on your friends' feeds (as does theirs on yours). Your drama is why your friends show up to read Facebook. Whether or not they click the 'like' button determines how you feel and deal with your emotions. When you are looking for approval for your emotions you are never dealing with your emotions. When you are never dealing with your emotions you are depressed.
- 1337biz 12y ago
  * depression is linked to compulsive purchases.* Do you have by any chance a source/study for that? Would love to read up on that issue a bit more.
  - nullc 12y ago
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9164428 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9164428 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291520-6793%28199612%2913:8%3C803::AID-MAR6%3E3.0.CO;2-J/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291520-67...
thewarrior 12y ago
As someone fighting depression , I think it's the other way around. When I'm depressed and completely out of energy , I try and find something low effort just to shut out the negativity. Most of the time that's scrolling through the newsfeed or aimlessly browsing porn. If Facebook didn't exist I might find something else. Facebook is the goto place to zone yourself out. It's only a problem when life is so barren that likes on your FB post become the highlight of your day. As long as you have healthy relationships and meaningful activities it will never become a problem. Through years of A/B testing they've trained us like rats to scroll through the newsfeed. Sometimes I'll find myself or someone else simply scrolling aimlessly , not even knowing why , just a tired brain looking for the next dopamine hit. Finally, I installed an extension that removes the newsfeed on my work computer and there's already a big improvement. I never thought such a stupid hack could make a difference , since I could always override it. But turns out that your brain is lazy and stupid , which you can use to your advantage by making wasteful activities just a wee bit more difficult. Making new habits is easiest when you rearrange your environment. Want to become fit. Try moving into an apartment with a cross fit freak and watch yourself change automatically. Want to become a better developer. Get a better job on a team that uses best practices and watch yourself strive to keep up. Ofcourse , out of all of this self improvement thinking comes the sort of existential angst that is caused by browsing FB,HN and Reddit and seeing how your life is just 1 % of what it could be and what your friends are having. This I think is separate and isn't restricted to Facebook. This has always and will continue to exist. So yeah sometimes you just can't win :D . These days everytime I feel depressed I have some chocolate. And also go for a vigorous walk. It sort of works but not nearly as well as it should ;) .
- plongeur 12y ago
  > As long as you have healthy relationships and meaningful activities it will never become a problem. If someone subjectively perceives this statement to be true about her/his life - then s/he is not suffering from depression - pretty much by definition.
  - jkrems 12y ago
    At least certain kinds of depression are actual, physical conditions. Sometimes without a known cure (only medication to keep the symptoms in check). Just because someone is able to move on their own, doesn't mean that their legs grew back. They might just use a wheelchair. And just because someone truly believes that they have a meaningful live, doesn't mean their depression "went away".
downandout 12y ago
It's more likely than not the other way around (depression causes Facebook use). Clinical depression starts from within, and is usually independent of one's circumstances (wealthy people with good families are often depressed too). Depressed people have a need to rationalize their feelings. "My life isn't as good as others" is a common rationalization for depression, and a service that lets them view the highlight reels of a billion other people whose lives appear to be better than theirs is the ultimate tool for it.
tragomaskhalos 12y ago
Am married to someone who is by any reasonable definition addicted to Facebook, and this reinforces what my gut has been telling me for some time. Part of the practical problem seems to be the compulsion to read everything that's on your feed; I myself have felt the siren call of this, but it becomes easier to break once you realise that you are not seeing everything from all of your 'friends' anyway, it's all algorithmically curated and filtered.
- TheBeardKing 12y ago
  I'm in the same boat, to the point where she asked me to password restrict her being able to install the facebook app. She'll still access it through the web interface, she says to make it more difficult to access. She's the introverted type, socially anxious, and I can understand the draw of being able to look into others lives without having to actually interact with them. The problem, then, is just as the study describes. Face to face conversations give a better glimpse on what's really going on personally, the good and the bad, while the newsfeed is a stream of bragging or things to be judgmental about. Top news is the feature of facebook I appreciate most. I would go crazy if I were only inundated with the stream of menial crap you see in real time. Facebook learns who I actually interact with and knows my family members, and shows me the "upvoted" stories so that when I get on facebook once daily for 3-5 mins, I'm caught up.
ksinggao 12y ago
hahahahaha this is exactly one of the reason why Twitter was getting populated. You can just twit or comment on things , and barely show off your own life, or making less comparison with others (well expect competing for gaining more followers). LOL
FollowSteph3 12y ago
It's not just the highlights reel, but rather the aggregate. So for example if you have say 52 friends (52 weeks in a year to put emphasis on the point) then the odds are that on any given week someone is on a trip. In other words it looks like all your friends are travelling all the time but it's not true, it just feels that way. Now if you increase your friends to 100, 200, 500, or more than this perception is even worse!! You'll be seeing multiple friends travelling each week. And on the holidays it will be even worse. However individually each friend is about the same on average. To make things even more skewed you will probably have a few friends that will indeed have a better highlight reel, and possibly a better life, so of course you'll compare yourself to them more than your average friends cause that's how humans work. And God forbid one is a prolific facebook poster! Also another thing to remember is that the more a post is liked the more feeds it showed up in. In other words really cool news will appear in a lot more feeds and negative news dies fast. This further skews our perceptions of how great things are. The key is that comparing in facebook is a bad thing. The data is all skewed and not really comparable, but we still do it because it's in our nature. The best advice is to try and appreciate and remember this and as a result avoid those kinds of comparisons. Well that and like everything else such as TV, etc., limit your time to something reasonable. Oh and if you have friends that are really just acquaintances that fall into these categories then don't be afraid to hide their feeds ;)
PaulHoule 12y ago
I can definitely say I see more acute distress about things that happen on Facebook than I see on any other site. It seems someone I know is upset about some interaction they had with somebody every few days.
coldcode 12y ago
With 1.3 billion subs, I assume Facebook use is linked to everything from winning Nobel prizes to terrorism.
br0mahn 12y ago
NoInstagram campaign, anyone? http://www.aimanbaharum.com/campaign/noinstagram.html http://www.aimanbaharum.com/campaign/noinstagram.html
loceng 12y ago
I just want to know how many (hopefully not any?) additional suicides occurred with the experiment Facebook did with their unethical research to either show more positive or more negative posts in people's newsfeeds; I can't remember the specific experiment but that is the gist of it.
VieElm 12y ago
Is there some way to opt out of these studies on Facebook? I don't use these services to be studied.
enupten 12y ago
Indeed, \max \{X_i\} has a very skewed distribution.
nicpottier 12y ago
I pretty much quit Facebook about 9 months ago[1], and I do feel happier for it. I've had a lot of conversations about Facebook, because I think the phenomenon there is really interesting. A few things for me: - I find it makes me think poorly of some of my best friends. The "humble brag" is kind of non-stop and in so many cases I know it isn't a real reflection of how those people feel. Yet sharing your amazing life is the "Facebook way" and is hard to escape. - Crazy enough, because I am lucky enough to live a pretty great life, I would often get feelings of envy or dissatisfaction from browsing it. This may be a personal failing of mine, but when comparing the best moments of my "closest" 500 friends, sometimes I come up short and for whatever reason I find it hard to separate that. I do really enjoy the ability to connect with old friends on Facebook and for that I love it, but ya, for me at least, I'm happier using it only when I need to reach out to those friends. [1] I do still have an account and perhaps browse a few minutes once a week, but that's coming from usually looking at it several times a day.
- dba7dba 12y ago
  Very much agree with it. Facebook is essentially a giant advertising machine, a friend advertising to other friends how great his life is (maybe not intentionally but still advertising). Browse through it long enough and often enough and you begin to feel envious of other friends.
- danudey 12y ago
  My Facebook account usage consists of: 1. Clicking the occasional link from my best friend (one of the only people who posts interesting things) 2. Being invited to events and looking up the address 3. Posting cat/baby pictures from Instagram And, of course, Facebook Messenger (the only reliable, functional cross-platform messaging system I've found)
  - eru 12y ago
    Have you tried WhatsApp? How do they compare?
    - 12y ago
JohnBooty 12y ago
My Facebook "happy place" involves using it like a glorified email system. In other words, it's "a tool I use to contact people" and not "a place where I hang out." I do not allow Facebook's various apps and operating system hooks to notify me ever unless I am directly messaged by somebody. Used this way, I find it really valuable and not distracting. There are tons of people I'd never be able to effectively keep in touch with without it. I also unfollow all of my negative FB friends. This is FB's most underrated feature. Instead of unfriending a person and dealing with the possible fallout, you can quietly unfollow them so that they don't show up on your feed. You can still contact each other, and they don't know they've been unfollowed. I'll always keep in touch with my closest friends, even if they move to a shack in the desert and I have to rent a camel to talk to them. But for the rest of the friends and family I maintain some level of contact with[1] - probably a hundred or so? - I don't know how I'd keep in touch with them anyway. ______________ [1] The threshold would probably be, "would I care if they got a new pet or not?"
cbr 12y ago
Looking at the details [1], it seems to be a small (N=180, then N=152) correlational study. How can we tell whether the effect is causal? One way would be to run a randomized controlled trial, where you show some people slightly happier or sadder Facebook streams and you see how they react. This experiment has, in fact been run, [2] and what they found was that seeing happy status updates seemed to make people happier, not sadder. [3] [1] http://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/jscp.2014.33.8.701 http://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/jscp.2014.33.8.7... [2] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full [3] Though what they actually measured was what people posted, not their happiness. Perhaps seeing happy things leads you to be sad but post happy things to fit in.
harmonicon 12y ago
Quitting Facebook has definitely made me more out of touch with friends who are not in the same locale. I do miss the ability to get timely updates on what they are up to. On the other hand, the separation has made reunion/catching up that much more exciting for us. When we do get together, it is always an exhilarating time, with so much to talk about and share. Personally I think this model works just fine for me.
googlyfuck 12y ago
Got to say, I feel pretty fucking depressed whenever I have to look at farcebook, so not surprised by this finding.
brymaster 12y ago
Some previous discussion on the same topic: "Facebook Is Making Us Miserable" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3335947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3335947
rohunati 12y ago
My biggest problem is I have so many services linked to Facebook, so if I delete Facebook, I delete the other services as well (Spotify, and every other website where I lazily clicked "Sign up with Facebook").
- schmichael 12y ago
  Just turn off notifications from it and don't visit it. The problem isn't with having an account; the problem is with overuse.
fatjokes 12y ago
Exactly why I quit FB. I'm definitely happier now.

225 points by alexcasalboni 12y ago

I think it's quite easy to neglect your own highlights reel and forget the good things you have going on in your own life. Made even more difficult if you don't actually post to facebook. Ultimately though, everyone's life has ups and downs; people tend to cherry pick the ups when posting to facebook, which is certainly worth remembering if you spend long periods of time on there obsessing over how much better other peoples' lives seem to be.

weisser 12y ago

I think most people realize this anecdotally but the switching costs are too high for many to remove themselves. Personally, I have many connections exclusively only on FB - I don't have their emails, phone numbers, etc - that I remain on FB only to be able to message them. I wish I could automatically message them and easily collect their email/phone #s with minimal effort...probably a way but I haven't looked into it.

ZenoArrow 12y ago
"I wish I could automatically message them and easily collect their email/phone #s with minimal effort...probably a way but I haven't looked into it." Have you considered asking for their email address? Could send them a private message on Facebook saying you're considering leaving Facebook but would still like to keep in touch. I imagine most people would be fine with sharing their email address if they've already linked up with you on Facebook.

spiritplumber 12y ago

I get depressed reading HN because a lot of the stories are about people my age who are making a lot more money than me. Then I tell myself that they probably haven't saved as many lives as I have. Then I have to tell myself that this doesn't pay the bills, dammit. HN/slashdot/FB in moderation, kids! Now you know and knowing is half the battle.

NietTim 12y ago
There's more to life then making money! Perhaps they have a terrible social life and you are doing much better. Work to live, don't live to work But yeah, I know that feeling.
_cudgel 12y ago
I would encourage you to read this: https://medium.com/matter/the-shut-in-economy-ec3ec1294816 https://medium.com/matter/the-shut-in-economy-ec3ec1294816 I suspect these people your age making a lot more money lead lives similar to what's described in this article. These do not seem like happy lives to me! If you're actively saving lives, that is more valuable than all the money in the world, and I thank you.
- plongeur 12y ago
  To react to other people's portrayed successfulness with doubting the legitimacy or their honesty and suspecting those people to be actually unhappy is almost as immature as getting depressed by it.
interdrift 12y ago
Whenever I get those kind of thoughts I remember that the last thought I will have on my death bed will be : what good did I leave to this world?
mibbitirc 12y ago
Make sure you read all the news stories about rich people who are depressed, and have horrible lives. Probably a lot more common than you think.
- philh 12y ago
  Pretty sure poor people are more likely to be depressed and have horrible lives than rich people.
  - tamebadger 12y ago

NietTim 12y ago

One thing that has always stuck with me is the phrase "Facebook is only a collection of the highlights in someones life". Most people only post the positive stuff about their lives to facebook, which makes their lives look way more awesome then they probably are.

TheBeardKing 12y ago
Is it the highlights of their life? Or is it 80% politically biased news stories, pinterest desires, funny videos and pictures, complaints about random encounters with people, and lots of "This"ing?
theorique 12y ago
You also get those people who post everything that's going wrong, hoping to elicit sympathy or attention.

sparaker 12y ago

Stalking often could make you feel depressed. But facebook in my case helped me meet with very old friends without any effort so thats a plus.

dang 12y ago

"Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside."

NoGravitas 12y ago
"Compare the best of how they look to the worst of how you are; you won't win." ~ Morrissey
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

mbrock 12y ago

I'm pretty skeptical about the explanatory value of the "highlights reel" theory. Anecdotally, most of what I see on Facebook is people sharing links to stuff, liking posts by public pages, saying happy birthday, and so on. Couldn't it just be that, uh, Facebook is kinda boring? Or, as the article mentions, that "depressed feelings and lots of time on Facebook [...] go hand in hand," in other words, lonely/isolated people habitually look for connection on social media, but the kinds of communication that happen there are not very interesting or loneliness-assuaging. David Foster Wallace's 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram" describes a similar tendency but with television as the substituting technology: "Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S. six hours a day. The lonely, like the fictional, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today social and support groups for persons with precisely these features. Lonely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let's call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase just loathes the strain of the self-consciousness which so oddly seems to appear only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear to watchers. He sits out the stressful U.S. game of appearance poker. "But lonely people, home, alone, still crave sights and scenes. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them, on the screen; They remain blind to Joe. It's almost like voyeurism."

scribu 12y ago
> Joe Briefcase just loathes the strain of the self-consciousness which so oddly seems to appear only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear to watchers. That's called social anxiety, just FYI. And yeah, it's plausible that people which have social anxiety are more prone to overusing social media etc.
- mbrock 12y ago
  Yeah, I guess. A study cited on Wikipedia claims that around 18% of American adults have some kind of social anxiety disorder, that is, chronic and debilitating forms of social anxiety. Of course, nearly everyone experiences social anxiety from time to time.

shubb 12y ago

Totally unsurprised - Unhealthy levels of facebook use, particularly apparent addiction to those annoying invite games are pretty obviously not the behavior of a happy person. When ever I get a slew of invites to Candy Crush or similar, it's always from someone a bit tragic. I mean, who else has the time to sit at home playing Facebook games, but the lack of motivation to go and do something more worthwhile?

pizza234 12y ago
I agree with the first statement, but this: > I mean, who else has the time to sit at home playing Facebook games, but the lack of motivation to go and do something more worthwhile? Is a bit more complicated. On a broader perspective, this pattern usage of Facebook is entertainment exactly like watching TV is (you even get the ads!). Considering that, based on the first statistic I've found on Google [0], the average American spends hours every day in front of a TV (even if not 5, 3/4 would be alarming), then there is a social problem, more than an individual one.
- corin_ 12y ago
  I'm probably not an average person (nor am I American), but my TV "average" is higher than actual pure TV watching. For example I could spend 8 hours with a friend, drinking some wine, chatting, with the TV on - paying attention to it at times, at others ignoring it. In terms of "how much do you watch TV" my total viewing time just went up 8 hours, but it was 8 hours of background for a night catching up with a friend, not 8 hours for the sake of passive consumption. Equally, I'll often put easy-watching TV on when I'm at home but doing something else - working on my laptop, text-chatting to friends on Skype/WhatsApp, browsing sites like Hacker News. Again, this would raise my average, but it's not quite the same as going "what am I doing tonight? Watching the TV and nothing else" if the TV is getting a small fraction of my attention. I just wonder to what extent this sort of half-watching increases averages, or on the flip side to what extent high-sounding averages are genuinely worrying.
- VLM 12y ago
  Averages mean something on a well defined graph, like a bell curve, especially with some extra numbers like std deviation. I find it nearly impossible to find a percentile graph of something like hours viewed along Y-axis and percentile population along the X. An excellent startup idea would be the very hard task of a search engine that can find graphs of a given X vs Y. Anyway, based on what little I can find, TV watching is absolutely not a bell curve as "young people" average only 2 or so hours per day and the elderly average over a working day per day (in excess of 8 hours per day of TV over 60 years old). My strong suspicion is TV viewership is strongly exponential vs percentile with "people in trouble" (medical problems, hospital patients, severely handicapped, addicts, prisoners) recording 24 hours/day or at least all 18 or so waking hours as viewing time, vs the majority the population in a declining exponential graph dropping to almost zero. Given a population distribution like that, an average is fairly meaningless when trying to draw cultural conclusions. Its like using average income or average wealth to draw economic conclusions. Or doing ergonomic design based on the average number of heads being well above one (think of Siamese twins). What cultural conclusions can you make about my typical normal lifestyle based on the average number of space qualified astronauts in my country? It is not a completely useless statistic, if the average TV draws a kilowatt then given a billion random people the electrical load due to TVs would be about 5 billion kilowatt-hours per day (5 TWh?). But the usefulness of the numbers break down when zoomed in.

onion2k 12y ago

Spending too much time comparing yourself to other people is depressing regardless of the media you use; someone who only reads biographies of wildly successful people will end up just as depressed as someone who spends too much time reading the edited highlights of lives on Facebook. To that end, this doesn't really have anything to do with Facebook. The medium is not the message.

mbrock 12y ago
More or less depressed than someone reading biographies of people in poverty and distress? Are people happier when their Facebook feeds contain more complaining? I'd guess that the "envy" effect is pretty marginal. "High levels of Facebook use" sounds to me about the same as "high levels of nail biting" or "high levels of watching cable TV." It's bored, nervous, pseudo-socializing, fruitless activity.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  Can't strictly agree to pseudo-socializing or fruitless. Online conversations have continued offline. Those were actual people I was talking to. Those conversations resume online, often enough. It's part of the fabric. An invitation to an actual event with actual people received on facebook, because of activity or exposure there, is not fruitless activity. But it is usually a bored, nervous activity. I can handily agree to that part.
  - mbrock 12y ago
    Yeah, I'm not trying to say it's all like that.
- onion2k 12y ago
  What it "sounds like" to you is just speculation, and to that end it isn't useful. The paper in the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal and is based on a proper scientific methodology and a pair of psychological studies. The outcome of the studies could be misunderstood but there at least appears to be some evidence for the author's conclusion.

guard-of-terra 12y ago

What's if it's the other way around? People prone to depression hanging on social media more.

jon-wood 12y ago
This sounds far more likely to me. If I'm having a crap time and have no energy I'm far more likely to passively consume Facebook than I am to actually leave the house and see somebody.

collyw 12y ago

For me it works the other way. If I have something interesting and creative to work on, forget Facebook I'll get absorbed in my work. If I am back to fixing the same dumb errors in users excel spreadsheets, then I get kind of pissed off (having complained to management that it is a crap solution to the problem many times). I become unenthusiastic and end up checking Facebook a lot more regularly.

alenmilk 12y ago

Social comparison is an old problem. Facebook is effective at spreading information thus amplifying the problem for those susceptible.

timepiece 12y ago

What about Twitter and reading the news from Russia Today and trolling people on Fox News related pages?

nullc 12y ago

Well, duh, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/03/sheryl-sandberg-not-sorry-for-facebook-mood-manipulation-study/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/03... More seriously, depression is linked to compulsive purchases. Now I'm not saying that they're intentionally adopting features and styles that depress their users, but should they stumble into one by chance fixing will hurt revenues. What outcome should we expect? Fear powerful optimization processes. Harm to mankind from inhuman intelligences doesn't require fancy AI: in the halls of the corporate Chinese room surprising behavior can arise just as well from complexity systems which are ultimately made of meat.

zamalek 12y ago
> More seriously, depression is linked to compulsive purchases. I think in the case of Facebook it's that you are the product, more specifically: your emotions are the product. You get other stereotypes but by-and-large the most well known stereotype on Facebook is someone who shares all their emotions. Facebook even encourages it: now in a relationship, married, divorced, broke up, etc. Relationships aren't "official" until they are "Facebook official." Your emotional drama is what shows up on your friends' feeds (as does theirs on yours). Your drama is why your friends show up to read Facebook. Whether or not they click the 'like' button determines how you feel and deal with your emotions. When you are looking for approval for your emotions you are never dealing with your emotions. When you are never dealing with your emotions you are depressed.
1337biz 12y ago
* depression is linked to compulsive purchases.* Do you have by any chance a source/study for that? Would love to read up on that issue a bit more.
- nullc 12y ago
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9164428 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9164428 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291520-6793%28199612%2913:8%3C803::AID-MAR6%3E3.0.CO;2-J/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291520-67...

thewarrior 12y ago

As someone fighting depression , I think it's the other way around. When I'm depressed and completely out of energy , I try and find something low effort just to shut out the negativity. Most of the time that's scrolling through the newsfeed or aimlessly browsing porn. If Facebook didn't exist I might find something else. Facebook is the goto place to zone yourself out. It's only a problem when life is so barren that likes on your FB post become the highlight of your day. As long as you have healthy relationships and meaningful activities it will never become a problem. Through years of A/B testing they've trained us like rats to scroll through the newsfeed. Sometimes I'll find myself or someone else simply scrolling aimlessly , not even knowing why , just a tired brain looking for the next dopamine hit. Finally, I installed an extension that removes the newsfeed on my work computer and there's already a big improvement. I never thought such a stupid hack could make a difference , since I could always override it. But turns out that your brain is lazy and stupid , which you can use to your advantage by making wasteful activities just a wee bit more difficult. Making new habits is easiest when you rearrange your environment. Want to become fit. Try moving into an apartment with a cross fit freak and watch yourself change automatically. Want to become a better developer. Get a better job on a team that uses best practices and watch yourself strive to keep up. Ofcourse , out of all of this self improvement thinking comes the sort of existential angst that is caused by browsing FB,HN and Reddit and seeing how your life is just 1 % of what it could be and what your friends are having. This I think is separate and isn't restricted to Facebook. This has always and will continue to exist. So yeah sometimes you just can't win :D . These days everytime I feel depressed I have some chocolate. And also go for a vigorous walk. It sort of works but not nearly as well as it should ;) .

plongeur 12y ago
> As long as you have healthy relationships and meaningful activities it will never become a problem. If someone subjectively perceives this statement to be true about her/his life - then s/he is not suffering from depression - pretty much by definition.
- jkrems 12y ago
  At least certain kinds of depression are actual, physical conditions. Sometimes without a known cure (only medication to keep the symptoms in check). Just because someone is able to move on their own, doesn't mean that their legs grew back. They might just use a wheelchair. And just because someone truly believes that they have a meaningful live, doesn't mean their depression "went away".

downandout 12y ago

It's more likely than not the other way around (depression causes Facebook use). Clinical depression starts from within, and is usually independent of one's circumstances (wealthy people with good families are often depressed too). Depressed people have a need to rationalize their feelings. "My life isn't as good as others" is a common rationalization for depression, and a service that lets them view the highlight reels of a billion other people whose lives appear to be better than theirs is the ultimate tool for it.

tragomaskhalos 12y ago

Am married to someone who is by any reasonable definition addicted to Facebook, and this reinforces what my gut has been telling me for some time. Part of the practical problem seems to be the compulsion to read everything that's on your feed; I myself have felt the siren call of this, but it becomes easier to break once you realise that you are not seeing everything from all of your 'friends' anyway, it's all algorithmically curated and filtered.

TheBeardKing 12y ago
I'm in the same boat, to the point where she asked me to password restrict her being able to install the facebook app. She'll still access it through the web interface, she says to make it more difficult to access. She's the introverted type, socially anxious, and I can understand the draw of being able to look into others lives without having to actually interact with them. The problem, then, is just as the study describes. Face to face conversations give a better glimpse on what's really going on personally, the good and the bad, while the newsfeed is a stream of bragging or things to be judgmental about. Top news is the feature of facebook I appreciate most. I would go crazy if I were only inundated with the stream of menial crap you see in real time. Facebook learns who I actually interact with and knows my family members, and shows me the "upvoted" stories so that when I get on facebook once daily for 3-5 mins, I'm caught up.

ksinggao 12y ago

hahahahaha this is exactly one of the reason why Twitter was getting populated. You can just twit or comment on things , and barely show off your own life, or making less comparison with others (well expect competing for gaining more followers). LOL

FollowSteph3 12y ago

It's not just the highlights reel, but rather the aggregate. So for example if you have say 52 friends (52 weeks in a year to put emphasis on the point) then the odds are that on any given week someone is on a trip. In other words it looks like all your friends are travelling all the time but it's not true, it just feels that way. Now if you increase your friends to 100, 200, 500, or more than this perception is even worse!! You'll be seeing multiple friends travelling each week. And on the holidays it will be even worse. However individually each friend is about the same on average. To make things even more skewed you will probably have a few friends that will indeed have a better highlight reel, and possibly a better life, so of course you'll compare yourself to them more than your average friends cause that's how humans work. And God forbid one is a prolific facebook poster! Also another thing to remember is that the more a post is liked the more feeds it showed up in. In other words really cool news will appear in a lot more feeds and negative news dies fast. This further skews our perceptions of how great things are. The key is that comparing in facebook is a bad thing. The data is all skewed and not really comparable, but we still do it because it's in our nature. The best advice is to try and appreciate and remember this and as a result avoid those kinds of comparisons. Well that and like everything else such as TV, etc., limit your time to something reasonable. Oh and if you have friends that are really just acquaintances that fall into these categories then don't be afraid to hide their feeds ;)

PaulHoule 12y ago

I can definitely say I see more acute distress about things that happen on Facebook than I see on any other site. It seems someone I know is upset about some interaction they had with somebody every few days.

coldcode 12y ago

With 1.3 billion subs, I assume Facebook use is linked to everything from winning Nobel prizes to terrorism.

br0mahn 12y ago

NoInstagram campaign, anyone? http://www.aimanbaharum.com/campaign/noinstagram.html http://www.aimanbaharum.com/campaign/noinstagram.html

loceng 12y ago

I just want to know how many (hopefully not any?) additional suicides occurred with the experiment Facebook did with their unethical research to either show more positive or more negative posts in people's newsfeeds; I can't remember the specific experiment but that is the gist of it.

VieElm 12y ago

Is there some way to opt out of these studies on Facebook? I don't use these services to be studied.

enupten 12y ago

Indeed, \max \{X_i\} has a very skewed distribution.

nicpottier 12y ago

I pretty much quit Facebook about 9 months ago[1], and I do feel happier for it. I've had a lot of conversations about Facebook, because I think the phenomenon there is really interesting. A few things for me: - I find it makes me think poorly of some of my best friends. The "humble brag" is kind of non-stop and in so many cases I know it isn't a real reflection of how those people feel. Yet sharing your amazing life is the "Facebook way" and is hard to escape. - Crazy enough, because I am lucky enough to live a pretty great life, I would often get feelings of envy or dissatisfaction from browsing it. This may be a personal failing of mine, but when comparing the best moments of my "closest" 500 friends, sometimes I come up short and for whatever reason I find it hard to separate that. I do really enjoy the ability to connect with old friends on Facebook and for that I love it, but ya, for me at least, I'm happier using it only when I need to reach out to those friends. [1] I do still have an account and perhaps browse a few minutes once a week, but that's coming from usually looking at it several times a day.

dba7dba 12y ago
Very much agree with it. Facebook is essentially a giant advertising machine, a friend advertising to other friends how great his life is (maybe not intentionally but still advertising). Browse through it long enough and often enough and you begin to feel envious of other friends.
danudey 12y ago
My Facebook account usage consists of: 1. Clicking the occasional link from my best friend (one of the only people who posts interesting things) 2. Being invited to events and looking up the address 3. Posting cat/baby pictures from Instagram And, of course, Facebook Messenger (the only reliable, functional cross-platform messaging system I've found)
- eru 12y ago
  Have you tried WhatsApp? How do they compare?
  - 12y ago

JohnBooty 12y ago

My Facebook "happy place" involves using it like a glorified email system. In other words, it's "a tool I use to contact people" and not "a place where I hang out." I do not allow Facebook's various apps and operating system hooks to notify me ever unless I am directly messaged by somebody. Used this way, I find it really valuable and not distracting. There are tons of people I'd never be able to effectively keep in touch with without it. I also unfollow all of my negative FB friends. This is FB's most underrated feature. Instead of unfriending a person and dealing with the possible fallout, you can quietly unfollow them so that they don't show up on your feed. You can still contact each other, and they don't know they've been unfollowed. I'll always keep in touch with my closest friends, even if they move to a shack in the desert and I have to rent a camel to talk to them. But for the rest of the friends and family I maintain some level of contact with[1] - probably a hundred or so? - I don't know how I'd keep in touch with them anyway. ______________ [1] The threshold would probably be, "would I care if they got a new pet or not?"

cbr 12y ago

Looking at the details [1], it seems to be a small (N=180, then N=152) correlational study. How can we tell whether the effect is causal? One way would be to run a randomized controlled trial, where you show some people slightly happier or sadder Facebook streams and you see how they react. This experiment has, in fact been run, [2] and what they found was that seeing happy status updates seemed to make people happier, not sadder. [3] [1] http://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/jscp.2014.33.8.701 http://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/jscp.2014.33.8.7... [2] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full [3] Though what they actually measured was what people posted, not their happiness. Perhaps seeing happy things leads you to be sad but post happy things to fit in.

harmonicon 12y ago

Quitting Facebook has definitely made me more out of touch with friends who are not in the same locale. I do miss the ability to get timely updates on what they are up to. On the other hand, the separation has made reunion/catching up that much more exciting for us. When we do get together, it is always an exhilarating time, with so much to talk about and share. Personally I think this model works just fine for me.

googlyfuck 12y ago

Got to say, I feel pretty fucking depressed whenever I have to look at farcebook, so not surprised by this finding.

brymaster 12y ago

Some previous discussion on the same topic: "Facebook Is Making Us Miserable" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3335947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3335947

rohunati 12y ago

My biggest problem is I have so many services linked to Facebook, so if I delete Facebook, I delete the other services as well (Spotify, and every other website where I lazily clicked "Sign up with Facebook").

schmichael 12y ago
Just turn off notifications from it and don't visit it. The problem isn't with having an account; the problem is with overuse.

fatjokes 12y ago

Exactly why I quit FB. I'm definitely happier now.