Consider the following scenario: You're pleased and content one minute, thinking your life is going fine the next. You have a few minutes to kill, so you log onto Facebook and begin scrolling...
First, you notice a friend's post stating that she has accepted her ideal job.
Then you read a coworker's too political rant.
You continue browsing and see a video of your neighbour enjoying a fantastic tropical vacation.
And now your cousin has uploaded a before and after photo that makes you want to hide your thighs for the rest of your life.
The next thing you know, you're second-guessing your profession, irritated by politics, wondering why you can't afford a trip, and researching your next diet.
> It comes down to you, are you using that as fuel to motivate you or are you seething inside and burning with envy?
> I honestly believe that envy is the thief of joy and if you allow it to consume you it will destroy you.
It's nice that you are able to do this, but most don't use social media this way. They see successful, beautiful people doing interesting things and they feel sad that they can't do the same. Can't you empathize?
So true. It's almost ironic how they mention they feel good when something good happens to someone else, but when not everyone may feel the same, then it's their problem.
"Why can't this be happening to me?" is considered envy, but "Why are you not happy for others like me?" is considered moral high ground.
(not op) Empathize yes, but I would encourage people to try as much as they possibly can to change their viewpoint from envy to joy. I think that's a healthier solution than hiding from it.
What is presented on social media is recognized as profile building by prof. Mueller, a recently developed phenomenom that he named profilicity in his book "You and your profile". I've always found all the shining social media accounts as inauthentic and distateful, but the book helped me realize how I developed profiles for myself and also how to recognize them by others. The end result: now I see the profiles just as highly currated expression of one's identity and don't stress at all about it.
This made me think: Back in the 90s when I was a teen there were several magazines here in Mexico (ERES, Tú) and the "socials" section in the local newspaper which dedicated to show you the amazing life of socialtes and other famous (or not so famous) people. Teenage girls and boys used to buy and "read" those magazines to get up to speed on the latest gossip, but also just to see what these people were doing.
compare reading a monthly magazine back then to today where it takes milliseconds to doom scroll through your unlimited, hyper-optimized for engagement “happiness highlight reel” social media newsfeed in the palm of your hand with 24/7 availability… yes it’s much much worse for kids today and both psychologically and behaviorally.
I think it's normal to be happy for others. But that doesn't mean it doesn't leave us performing a little introspection with regards to our own lives.
Of which we think, why aren't I losing weight? Why aren't I getting married yet? Hmm why haven't I been able to go on a vacation yet? Oh because I might not be overly happy in my job, but I just saw my friend start what they think is their dream career.
You can be left questioning our own place when you are constantly being shown the highlights of others lives.
I too feel happy when something good happens in someone's life. I am sure a lot of people do. That is not by itself the origin of envy. So where do I look next?
Once the spectacle is over - at myself of course!
I see my shortcomings and from there begin the possibility for all kinds of problems and at the same time improvements in my life. What course does my mind take though? I can certainly hear the voice of resentment in my head when I see something I think is "good for them!" But I must quieten that voice and turn to what is the better approach - to improve myself. This takes effort.
So no it is not as simple as you put it here. I am sure you are aware of this struggle. This is not something new.
What is new is the frequency with which one is presented with things that reproach ones sense of well-being. Are they eating better food? Living better, happier lives? Having more beautiful babies? And why?
So it is only probable that one will slip into a stupor- with so many shortcomings and so many people out there.
If other people find their ideal job, have a tropical vacation, etc. it makes me feel... good? Those are good things in general, although the tropical vacation might make me also feel concerned about the climate.
The problems I have with social media are that
- it steals a lot of time
- a lot of content gets me by evoking negative emotion
- it's taxing to get exposed to so many different ideas, clips, heated discussions, etc. Makes we wanna throw away my phone and live in the woods
> If other people find their ideal job, have a tropical vacation, etc. it makes me feel... good? Those are good things in general, although the tropical vacation might make me also feel concerned about the climate.
If this would be your genuine reaction, congratulations. You belong to the 0.001% of the population that would feel this way.
I feel content with my life and I'm genuinely happy when my friends accomplish something. I can't remember when I was seriously envious last time. Sometimes, there may be a moment when I feel slight envy, but then I realize that they decided to put effort into that, and I put my effort into something else. Time is limited. Everyone has problems; ups and downs.
I've mostly quit social media because the majority of active people are not interesting, it's full of ad-garbage and heated up debates about dis-interesting topics.
I guess I'm also in the 0.0001%. Though, I do think it's much higher than that. The dissatisfied people are just the most vocal.
Okay, I suppose going by the strict definition of "social media", it does. The study cites "Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok" as examples, however.
Do you believe there is a fundamental difference between these sites, and something like HN (despite both being social media)? I feel like there is. I know this might come off as "I use the superior, intellectual site" or something like that (even though I use the other sites occasionally). But reading tech-related news and comments about it feels very different than scrolling through funny videos on TikTok.
I don't mean to say HN is any better in terms of mental health than either of the others - I spend more time on it than I really should. But I never leave it feeling depressed or jealous like I do on more common social media: I always feel like I learned something rather than watching a meme I'll forget in 30 seconds.
I agree. I actually pointed out in another comment that the term social media does not make any sense. Everyone has a different definition of social media. We can't really generalize findings on all platforms. The studies focusing on social media are often missing that it does not really make any sense to use that word. Are Twitter and Facebook the same? Can we generalize findings on one to another? No we can't. Talking about "social media" this way does not make much sense. It also hides out the fact that in the end everything is about the internet and digital content, together forming the new mass medium which is actually the relevant unifying factor. I'm glad you picked that up!
Are you sure it is that rare? I find it shocking that most people don't feel joy when the people they care about are happy. My assumption is that depressed people would feel worse, but people who are generally happy themselves would feel happy when someone else is feeling happy.
Where do you get your assumption that only 1 in 100,000 people are happy for others? The fact that there are at least two people who feel this way commenting in this chat seems to imply your numbers are off. I don't think the percentage of depressed people in the world is that high.
If a friend gets a great job or starts to live a healthy life you don't feel great for them? I don't believe that puts me in the minority of people, not a chance.
> If a friend gets a great job or starts to live a healthy life you don't feel great for them?
We can feel happy (for them) and unsatisfied (with ourselves) at the same time. Multiply that by N, and well, that's a recipe for disaster (at least for me). I know, I know, we shall not compare ourselves with others, but hey, I'm not a machine, I have my imperfections which I am polishing from time to time, but in the meanwhile social media makes everything worse in average (for me).
I travel more than average so I am happy seeing friends going on trips. It's rare that their trip looks better than what I've just done or have planned next. But I could absolutely see how someone might spectate a feed full of holidays and feel from the aggregate like everyone else is constantly travelling, while they grind away at work.
Meanwhile my family's barely travelled the past three years due to Covid concerns, tighter budgets (wife's income got severely impacted from the pandemic for a while, while this year we had to unexpectedly pay a good vacation's worth of taxes), and having to use PTO for other unrelated things. Most I've done is a few weekend trips to neighboring states.
Since this is about the effect of social media on mood, I'll chime in to say that it's the opposite for me.
Seeing people conspicuously consume extravagant leisure travel – and the associated resources – brings to mind global warming and how few people actually give a damn about it in any meaningful way.
It also reminds me of what brazen liars many people are. In cases where I've known the people posting Facebook/Insta content about their amazing trips, in about half of those, the reality is that the trip was far less than amazing than their posts would suggest.
As an example, one woman I know took her family across the Pacific to Thailand on a two-week vacation. By their accounts, they had a pretty rotten time, even considering moving their return date forward. But, the Facebook narrative was glowing. Four years later, the woman's Facebook cover photo is of a Thai Buddhist temple from that trip. (She's not a Buddhist. The photo is purely for aesthetics and social signaling.)
It seems to me that this kind of behavior feeds into a loop that encourages other people to consume finite resources and then post about their "amazing" (though often non-amazing) trips. And so the cycle continues.
And that really gets me down. I don't go on Facebook very often.
One could be “happy”* for a friend and also feel shitty about themself.
“Damn. Matthew has changed jobs 3 times in the past 5 years already, each time to a better paying job. Look at you. You’re still stuck in this shitty job because you suck.”
This is literally the kind of thought I have had in the past.
[*] Are you “happy” in a polite way? Or are you genuinely happy?
Genuinely happy, of course! I want to see my friends and family succeed in life and enjoy it. I don't feel like a lesser person in any way, I feel proud of them.
that was all OP was referring too and it's well documented. Honestly you come off as dishonest in this convo as it's quiet a normal emotion to feel and it's not negative per say, it can lead to negative actions but can also push people to do better.
"It doesn't matter if the slight is real or not, its the perception of the person that matters"
-- Jimmy Hoffa
I've never felt envy towards my friends and family. No, never. I find it bizarre that you do.
I never said I don't feel envy. You jumped to conclusions based on a very little sentence I wrote.
I currently have a very severe skin condition, and I live in a country with 'free' healthcare. I am envious that some people get medical treatment for it and can live a normal life again and some people do not (such as myself).
I don't give a shit if you think I'm dishonest, you do not know me.
Why? Feeling envious is just human nature. Sure, one can argue that in our current society that kind of feeling is "bad", and we should "fix it". I tend to agree, but that you find it bizarre, it's bizarre to me :D
Oh well, maybe you are a machine (based on your nickname), so yeah, machines do not have imperfections (just kidding).
> It's definitely not "human nature" to feel envy towards your friends and family.
Let me tell you how I had envied my cousin when he had a Super Famicom (a.k.a. SNES in North America) with a stash of great games and I didn't (not even the base machine), when I was a kid. He never wronged me. In fact, we were really good buddies when we lived next to each other more than 20 years ago, but I still envied.
Does feeling envy make someone an asshole in your eyes? Do you believe that people who feel envy can choose to not feel it? If they can't choose not to feel it, are they doomed to be an asshole (by your definition) for the rest of their lives, barring some change outside of their control?
To me, simply feeling envy (or any negative emotion) doesn't really say anything about the person. Actively stoking negative emotions or acting on them moves the needle in the direction of asshole, though.
Suppose you tell a friend about a job you're applying to, they think it sounds nice, so they apply too and they get the job and you don't. You're not jealous of that?
Or maybe your brother and you have a crush on the same woman. He asks her out and they start dating. You aren't jealous.
Or just suppose you always wanted something at home, a hot tub, a big screen tv, a walk-in closet, a home office, whatever, and you find out your friend has the thing - you'd be envious right?
It seems like you're confusing being envious of someone as a negative feeling towards them, which is why you're getting caught up on the friends and family aspect. It shouldn't matter if it's friends and family - they are often the people you know the most about so you'll find out if they do/have something you want. If you let your envy turn to anger and contempt, that's the negative part, but you don't have to - that's just having a healthy perspective and self-control
- I've been in this situation and I was joyed for my mate, I ended up getting a better offer from elsewhere so it worked out anyway. He's still there, now as a lead architect
- This would absolutely make me jealous, but I've never been in that situation
- No, this is the weirdest one. I have friends who own huge houses (multiple!) and sports cars. I'm happy for their success, I find it genuinely mental that you would be (are? surely you have more successful friends) jealous because your mate has a better car than you. Jesus.
And I'm not "stuck" in the friends and family bit, that's been the whole context of the thread.
If you feel truly happy about someone else but at the same time not let it reflect on you, then I would say you are minority. The first part of my sentence is achievable and is genuinely positive , at least in a way. The second part - not letting it reflect on you - is IMO most people struggle.
Take it or leave it, Metta meditation is pretty squarely aimed at that. I’ve had only the tiniest bits of success, but trying a book/video/app is a ton cheaper+easier than therapy!
Indeed, it's even possible to be genuinely happy for someone but still feel inferiority and discouragement when trying to compare aspects of one's own life with others.
It's great that not everyone struggles with that, but different people struggle with different emotions. Maybe we can all agree that whatever their nature and whatever we call them is beside the point, (I think) that social media engagement optimizations have notoriously exploited these effects as they relate to our attention and habits, taking many people on an unwanted emotional roller-coaster ride for arguably unhealthy amounts of time.
I had that feeling. It pushed me to move to something better recently after stagnating for years.
It’s an ambivalent feeling. I was definitely stressed for months thinking about how much worse my life is as a consequence of comparing myself to someone else. But at the same time, I’ve lifted myself up to a higher standard since that stress turned into motivation. That friend who I felt envious of is also happy for my success, and I’m also happy for his.
I don't think you're in the minority either. We experience joy from the joy of those around us.
I think the disagreement here mostly stems from a different definition of "friend". For most ppl, the friends they see on their FB/IG feed aren't actually "friends"... but more like acquaintances. Often times they're people that you've only met a few times and haven't seen in many years.
Though, even with close friends, sometimes one can't help but compare. And since social media only highlight the highlights, you'll naturally feel bad when comparisons happen.
Seems that with apps like BeReal/Locket taking off in the GenZ market this is starting to shift a little.
But even when it comes to acquaintances, when I hear about their great new job or vacation, I don't feel envious or bad. I compare myself to other people, yes, and of course I'd like to have some of the things I see, but not to the point that I would feel bad. Does every story about someone being successful make you feel bad? I doubt it, as that is not my personal experience at all.
You keep grouping envy with inherently negative mindsets. Sometimes envy is just envy. As in, "damn, John is married with kids and a great job, and I'm still single and scraping by, I gotta get my shit together". I am not upset that John has these things, I am happy my friend John is happy. It also served as a reminder of what I want for myself, and thus, my envy is a motivator.
This is not envy in my opinion. You are not upset, you are happy John is happy, where is the envy exactly? You recognizing that he has something you don't?
An actual friend then sure, but most people I know have like 500+ “friends” so I think people are less likely to have that reaction to everyone in the timeline.
A lot of this depends on how one's life is going. It is easy and natural to be genuinely happy for others when you are satisfied with your own life. But if I became unemployed and my friend got into Google then yeah...happiness level will be limited. There is a sound evolutionary explanation on why that is so.
This sure plays a big role, I agree. Maybe I would feel some envy in that example, but I would also not let it consume me, and still feel happy for my friend at the same time.
Social status and the satisfaction (or lack thereof) derived from it are relative. This has been studied and hammered on again and again, not to mention the entirety of human history (and tons of lucrative rackets) attest to it.
And being "the lord of your destiny" is already not applicable to most people, except in an abstract, meaningless sense that a person can always decide for themselves. That doesn't mean they can wish reality away. (E.g. "Yeah, I have $200K in student debt, no job prospects after looking for 10 months, and my spouse got sick, but I can do whatever I decide").
If these people think they're the only ones with problems and other people's lives are problem-free, well that's the issue. Not even the most accomplished person has a smooth ride.
That's kind of the whole point: social media presents you with a highlight of the smooth ride scenarios in people's lives (and even those, made to appear even fancier with all kinds of tricks and cutting out of "behind the scenes" context).
And rationally being aware of this doesn't help either: you still get the raw first experience at an emotional level.
>But why would I? It's not like they took something from me. I am the lord of my destiny.
Envy. You can be genuinely happy for them, but then be sad that your life isn't going as well. I think this compounded by the idea that a lot of people don't feel like the lords of their destiny, more leaves in a river unable to fight the currents.
Which of course adds to the stress of "Why can't I be better and more like [friend]?". Which may or may not lead to productive self-reflection (more likely not in my experience)
>And how is it in any way different from the same people telling me this stuff at a pub? I don't think social media has anything to do with this.
Scale, I would imagine. If it was one or two friends I think it's easier to rationalise, but when you see friends-of-friends and celebrities "living their best life", every day, while you struggle to keep your head above water, it takes a toll.
But does it exacerbate the problem more than other ways of social interaction?
As opposed to a real life social interaction, I can simply hit Unfollow on Facebook (so we stay Friends but I don't see your posts unless I look for them)...
Maybe social media gives you a much more concentrated feed of things that can trigger your inferiority complex, compared to normal, real-life social interactions?
And if you have to resort to unfollowing, you’re basically agreeing that it’s a problem.
I don't see how that proves anything specific to social media, I'm "unfollowing" people IRL all the time, it's not like I want to hear everything someone has to say, especially not if it makes me sad.
I just can't see the reason why this is about social media, and not about personal relations in general. Someone makes me sad IRL - I don't listen to them. Someone makes me sad on social media - well I don't listen to them. Where's the difference?
I can understand the scale argument, but I can't see why it's a problem after I've unfollowed the problematic accounts.
At one point in my life, I unfollowed literally every FB friend I had - because I wanted to follow my groups but my friends' posts were too political and this kind of talk had a bad effect on me. I can't see why people just don't do that when social media makes them sad.
I don't know how much of this is reality, but to me the argument is as follows:
Let's say seeing a certain type of post makes someone sad, and that this causes that person's mind to wander, slowing or stopping their feed-scrolling for a moment now and then when they see such content. This means they're now stopped on the feed at a potentially vulnerable moment. There is now a monetary incentive for the feed curation algorithm to continue doling out the kind of posts that make the user sad, as well as placing targeted advertisements right with them - ideally ones that exploit the negative emotion in some way.
I realize not everyone reacts the same way. Maybe they speed up their scrolling instead. The kinds of behavior that social media feed curation algorithms track and act upon is opaque, and I think that lack of transparency and accountability can easily have unfortunate consequences.
Personally I'm happy when good things are happening for family, friends and other people, but depending on my mood it can also trigger feelings of FOMO/anxiety (why isn't that happening for me, what am I missing, etc.). My guess is depending on the person and their current state that falling into a pattern of focussing on the latter rather then the former is easier when using social media. Which can then be a bit of a vicious cycle because cutting yourself off from social media may also mean you miss events that you could have participated in
Yeah I’m with you, I think the response itself might be an indicator of a certain personality type or if negative then a clue of unhealthy thinking habits.
Most of us commenting here live in competitive, capitalistic societies and a lot of our sense of self worth and self esteem comes from comparison (mostly comparing to our friends, colleagues and siblings) - and the metrics as we all know are stuff like career/money and other social status metrics.
Feelings of envy are completely involuntary btw so there is no need to pretend like feeling them or not feeling is some kind of moral virtue - you don't control what you feel or don't feel.
It sounds reasonable to me to speculate that these feelings have an evolutionary basis - e.g when you were envious of your neighbor's cave you felt crappy and worked harder on your own cave, thus increasing your own survival rate and the prevalence of envious genes. We are a biological creature designed for survival and envy seems very important to me in achieving it.
Does that mean we have to be slaves to our genes? I hope not. People like Sam Harris and others offer all kinds of methods to detach and "win" over our biology.
While feelings may be involuntary, this does not mean we are beholden to them. Maybe envy is what happens when a consciousness is discontent and allows these feelings to overpower.
envy: "a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else's possessions, qualities, or luck"
So it's just a feeling. What you do with it (actions) is up to you, most people don't act upon those feelings in any noticeable way.
But if we are being honest with ourselves constant feelings of envy often do lead to a deteriorating relationship (usually in the form of the person feeling envious choosing to distance himself from whomever he's feeling envious of), simply for the fact that feeling envious feels like crap - and when you are feeling envious of a person you actually care about it feels double crap (you feel envious and guilty at the same time).
This is a profound insight. What do you do if you know someone is distancing themselves from you out of envy? (And what do you do if you're the one with the envy?)
Is the answer generally just "it is what it is?" That's so dark.
Some people deal with these feelings better than others. Also - if for example you are much richer than average you can still live a humble life. You dont have to drive a Porsche. That's all I have...
I sincerely do not believe that this behavior is genetic. As you've said, many of us live in competitive capitalist societies, we are conditioned into a socipathic mindset by advertising, and educated to reduce the people in our lives to numbers on a spreadsheet. This is not how humans are meant to function, we have been conditioned and trained to think this way.
It is exacerbated by our current system for sure but I think the core of it is still there, genetically. I say that because I remember my old dog would act up if I petted the cat sometimes. Also very young toddlers show envious behaviour when a sibling is born.
If true, it seems easy to optimize for your own happiness (or lack of hurt) by replacing more-likely-to-succeed friends with less-likely-to-succeed ones...
I think this depends on persons internal happiness. Happy people feel happier and sad people get sadder. This is based on my own experiences.
In my 20s, I was as happy as one can be. I posted a lot on social media and enjoyed posts of my friends. Loved food posts cause that gave me new resturants to try out.
Vacation pictures, I couldn't afford a nice vacation but vacationed via those pictures. Asked friends to post more pictures.
Friend got a job, it meant time for a party.
Now I am not as happy as I used to be. Now I do get annoyed with food and vacation photos. Feel jealous when friends are promoted. I rarely go on social media but when I do I immediately feel bad about myself.
Maybe I am just getting old.
Oh and yes when I was on Facebook, no one posted about politics. In fact, I remember reading my first few political posts of my friends and thinking whats wrong with them.
> If other people find their ideal job, have a tropical vacation, etc. it makes me feel... good?
This sounds like a misunderstanding. Being happy for friends (real friends not "500 Facebook friends" friends) is not mutually exclusive with these news invoking bad feelings inside you (shame, feeling of inadequacy etc.)
It's not a misunderstanding. I'm also happy for complete strangers. Jeff Bezos is enjoying his Amazon money? Great for him.
Also, I can't relate to feelings of shame or inadequacy because someone has something good happening to them. If anything, it motivates me to achieve the same.
> Also, I can't relate to feelings of shame or inadequacy because someone has something good happening to them. If anything, it motivates me to achieve the same.
Those two aspects feel like they are opposing one another. On the one hand, you claim to never feel inadequate, yet when you see others achieving something you haven't yet achieved you claim it motivates you to achieve the same. How is it that you feel adequately achieved in some area yet another's greater success motivates you to achieve more? Most people I know would label that feeling "inadequacy". They don't yet have something they want and strive to get it.
I think the way you label these emotions is unique relative to everyone else I've meet. You're the first person who can't relate to feeling inadequacy yet at the same time feels motivated by things others have achieved.
> On the one hand, you claim to never feel inadequate, yet when you see others achieving something you haven't yet achieved you claim it motivates you to achieve the same
That doesn't mean you are feeling inadequate. Being inspired doesn't mean you feel bad about yourself.
For example, whenever I watch really good basketball, it makes me want to go out and play myself. When I see someone playing a fun video game, it makes me want to play. I don't feel inadequate, I just want to participate in the fun and challenge.
Maybe I'm using the word incorrectly then. There are two ways I can imagine feeling inadequate when seeing, for example, a post of someone on a Hawaiian vacation:
1. I have inadequate resources. I can never afford such fancy lodgings, etc. This is a pretty negative emotion.
2. I feel my vacationing has been inadequate. I should spend more time off with my loved ones. Where can I go in my time and dollar budget to better enjoy life?
I would call both feels one of being 'inadequate'. If I felt adequate, I would feel like I don't need any (more) vacations and not inspired to make any changes in my life.
At least that was my reading of id's comment that "If anything, it motivates me to achieve the same." Without any feeling of inadequacy, where does the motivation come from? Maybe I process these feelings differently than others, but for me without something to trigger the desire, I won't be motivated, and that trigger is in some sense something inadequate I want to improve about myself or my life.
3. I have adequate resources, but hadn't really thought about going on a Hawaiian vacation. Maybe I should start planning a tropical trip, that looks really fun!
Or even if you don't currently have the money saved up, maybe now that you see how fun a trip like that could be you want to start saving for it.
Basically, this is how I feel about my life and seeing people having fun doing stuff:
I like my life. I have a ton of things I enjoy doing, and I spend my free time cycling through those things I like. However, there are so many fun things to do I can't possibly do them all at once. I have a huge backlog of fun things to do, and I enjoy thinking about one day doing all of them. I don't feel bad that I can't do them all at once, because I am busy enjoying the fun things I am currently doing.
At the same time, there are many fun things to do that I haven't even thought about! I encounter new fun things all the time online, and when I see someone doing something that looks fun I think, "Wow, that looks cool! I might enjoy that someday!" So I will put it on my list of things to do, and maybe if it intrigues me enough I will try to move it up on the list. It might take some work to learn how to do the thing or to gain the resources to do it, but that doesn't bother me, because I like working to learn new things or save up resources. Working hard is one of the things I like doing!
Sometimes, I see someone having fun doing something and I have no interest in doing it myself, but I still really enjoy seeing someone else having fun doing it. I love seeing passionate people pursuing their hobbies. I find it fun to peer into subcultures that form around strange activities that I have no personal interest in, but love that there exists people who are super into it. The variety interests me.
That third option I lump into my second option. Whenever I feel like "I should X" it's because I have inadequate X in my life. Whatever X may be. In my estimation, inadequacy is the driver of desire and not necessarily a negative, unhealthy emotion. But without it, I wouldn't have any desires. I have desires and I have feelings of healthy (positive) inadequacies.
I might be using the word differently than everyone else, but that's why I try to explain what I mean. If for you and id inadequacy can only be a negative feeling then I agree social media need not evoke that emotion, but for many people it often does. But I don't think inadequacy is necessarily a negative feeling. I can be a positive driving force.
I'm not doubting your ability to do that and I'm not saying that negative feelings come inherently with these kind of news. But surely you can see that these reactions can be pretty common for many people especially if they aren't happy with their own situations, and that those people can still feel happy when good things happen to others.
What I'm claiming is that a negative reaction (in terms of comparison) in this way and feeling happy for others are independent of each other.
But you can see how some people may not think this way when they go online and see that seemingly everyone they've ever met is doing things that they can't afford or aren't able to do? If you can't relate, fine I guess, but what's the point of just saying "these problems don't affect me"?
> these news invoking bad feelings inside you (shame, feeling of inadequacy etc.)
Then perhaps it might make more sense to work on that instead, wouldn't it? I mean if we as a species became a little less jealous of each other, an utopia would be practically at hand.
Thought experiment - let's say you are the poorest person in your neighborhood. Would talking to your neighbors daily about their salaries really make you feel better? I mean them having money, even if more than you is a good thing according to you what you said.
Just FYI, Not everyone feels jealousy like you're suggesting here.
I know I never have. I never understood why people get so worked up about that sort of thing honestly. It never bothered me if someone wanted to date my ex, or if they had some sudden windfall, or are doing well.
But I see some people feel this intensely! I'm sympathetic, IMO, they don't choose to feel that way. But it's funny to me, if I were to walk down the street and see two people, and give each of them $5, it would be all smiles. But for a certain percentage of people, if I gave the person on the left $5 and the person on the right $100, they'd feel worse than when they had no money!
Never said everyone, but it's definitely prevalent. How prevalent could be an interesting discussion (I don't know the answer) but I have many reasons to believe most people do experience it from time to time based on my personal experience and how I interpret behavior of others.
Also there is a biological/evolutionary incentive to be a bit envious and jealous which affirms my conviction that it is prevalent.
Moreover - how do you know you won't experience it in the future? Have you ever been unemployed for 4 years? Maybe being unemployed for 4 years would make you envious of a friend who just got a job in Google. Have you ever been with a woman you loved dearly only to find out she cheated on you and left you for another man? Maybe going through this traumatic experience would make you envious.
I'm just saying it's easy to be content when things are going well, indeed I don't feel much envy - but I'm super aware I am quite lucky. If things stop going well who knows what negative emotions would pop up - it won't be a picnic thats for sure.
Yes, because if they made less money, it wouldn't help me at all (it could even hurt me because then they have nothing to share). In difficult personal situations, it has often helped me to know that at least others have it better.
> Yes, because if they made less money, it wouldn't help me at all
Let's continue this thought experiment - say with a flick of my fingers I made everyone in the world have half the money they have now - but I leave you with the same amount. So you are basically 2X richer than you were before. You say this doesn't help you at all - I think it actually increases your chances of finding housing, finding a mate, getting healthcare etc. Your material well being is established relative to others. If we expand the neighborhood example further - to city or country, it is obvious why the amount others have relative to you matters.
In a world of infinite resources envy doesn't make sense, but in our world resources are limited.
Yeah, but you changed the thought experiment from neighbourhood to "everyone in the world". This obviously would have a much, much bigger impact on my relative wealth.
And even then, the economy is not a zero-sum game. It is possible to become wealthier without making others poorer. If I get healthcare, it doesn't mean that someone else needs to be denied healthcare.
> And even then, the economy is not a zero-sum game
I agree to an extent. If say GDP increases it usually means the economy does better which means you will get better services (healthcare, housing, personal safety for you and your children etc) so you have an interest in others doing well.
However you also have an interest in not doing worse than most since as I said the amount of resources you can get is relative to others (resources is anything from housing to healthcare to your ability to find a mate).
I think this principal hasn't changed much since us being cavemen and neither have feelings of envy.
And again, there is not much evolutionary since in having no feelings of envy at all since it's a big motivator for people. Many times you feel envy or anxiety and you do something about it to improve your lot. Its there for a reason (sure, often it goes out of hand which is unfortunate). Consider yourself fortunate for not feeling much envy (or at all)!
Sure, but there is only one person in the neighborhood that is the poorest. Most people are going to be around the average, so they aren't going to have the experience of everyone being richer than them.
Having actually thrown away my phone, and lived in the woods, I can say I recommend the former as a fantastic mental health improvement. Living in the woods, not so much.
My very favorite part of HN is when someone is like “I’m actually an experienced XYZer, here’s the inside scoop” usually for a niche industry, now for niche lifestyles.
Thanks for the data point! Can you say more about the experience? Where did you end up?
I guess the other animals there's strategies to deal with them.
Poison ivy sneaks up on you. Young plants can be hard to see, and if you're like me, you won't know you've been exposed for a few days... And then it's ALL OVER.
> Makes we wanna throw away my phone and live in the woods
What I tried to aim for in Digital Vegan 1[] is to get people thinking
about tech as a healthy balance.
It is actually rather common to have these extreme swings, all or
nothing, total technological connection or living off berries in a
woodland shack. It's called splitting in psychology, and the
conditions around technology are geared to maximise it.
That's partly because it is so aggressive, in it's marketing, and peer
pressure, in it's network effects created by deliberate lack of
interoperability, by the way it is forced upon people. Young people
are constantly bullied into over-connection by the idea they will be
"left behind", that they will "miss out", and that a total cybernetic
society of "ubiquitous" technology is "inevitable". All a total crock
of shit of course. Nobody wants that except a few silicon valley
pushers. But if you are immersed in that toxic narrative, which comes
through the medium itself, it's hard for anyone to exercise rational
choice, self-control and use technology in a moderate, healthy way.
So to me it makes sense to define "hacker" as someone who has mastery
over technology. A master is not dominated by their own creations and
desires. Part of mastery is choosing exactly how much, and what type
of technology to use, and not allowing other people to foist that upon
you. Real hackers make technological choices that may marginalise
them, instead of just following the crowd.
> So to me it makes sense to define "hacker" as someone who has mastery over technology. A master is not dominated by their own creations and desires. Part of mastery is choosing exactly how much, and what type of technology to use, and not allowing other people to foist that upon you.
I like that definition and they way you argue. But don't forget that i.e. Meta and all other social networks are paying hords of hackers to screw with your emotions. I.e. you have a really capable opponent.
Why do I claim that social networks and other pay hackers to screw with our emotions? Actually I am convinced they don't care at all about the emotions of their users. They only care about their attention. Since, that is what is being sold to advertisers. Therefore, they do anything to prohibit users from staying in control of their social media use. That doesn't mean that it is impossible to use social media responsibly and healthy, but it is not easy.
I think you make a really good point. One should in no way
underestimate the strength of an adversary. Nor the extent of ones own
vulnerabilities. These guys have almost unlimited powers of money to
employ PhDs in psychology, UX "attention engineering", disinformation,
and other kinds of manipulation. Therefore "self-hacking" is kind of
where it's at for this stage of the battle.
The plus side is that:
1) We know what they're up to now, and that is half the struggle.
2) We know that they are indeed adversaries (enemies of democracy
and mental health), and that is also important.
Past that point, even a small number of us who are well educated,
resourceful, and committed to clear communication, can have a
significant impact. At the very least we can defend ourselves and help
others to build intellectual self-defence.
And we are changing things. Even two years ago this discussion and the
comments in this thread would have been unthinkable. We would have
been shouted down by social media zealots and labelled "weirdos" (which
I think is the very essence of hacker spirit - proud to be on the
"weird" side of the fight right now).
>If other people find their ideal job, have a tropical vacation, etc. it makes me feel... good?
As if regular people don't compare themselves with others and just enjoy the success of everybody, without considering if they are falling behind or not?
The healthy spin on that is seeing possibilities for making progress towards one's own goals.
Someone losing weight or getting fit/getting a new cert, etc makes me think "I can do that!"
In social media, the constant highlights of the successes of other people makes you miserable for yourself, whether you feel happy for others too or not.
Besides an experience many can verify, it's also quite well studied, including in the linked article.
> In social media, the constant highlights of the successes of other people makes you miserable for yourself
That might be how it makes you (and others) feel, but that doesn't mean everyone feels that way. There are people on this thread trying to say that it doesn't make them feel that way, but they keep being dismissed. The studies don't say EVERYONE feels that way, so to act like they are WRONG about how they feel is overly dismissive.
I think it's normal to be happy for others. But that doesn't mean it doesn't leave us performing a little introspection with regards to our own lives.
Of which we think, why aren't I losing weight? Why aren't I getting married yet? Hmm why haven't I been able to go on a vacation yet? Oh because I might not be overly happy in my job, but I just saw my friend start what they think is their dream career.
You can be left questioning our own place when you are constantly being shown the highlights of others lives.
I don't think this is incompatible. While you may feel happy for them, seeing the upper bounds on "the good life" could also subtly impact your own expectations and the way you think of yourself.
This doesn't even need to be an effect you can detect, moment to moment, but more of a subconscious push to "want more" from life due to observing what other people are doing.
There's an essay[0] in the latest edition of The New Atlantis titled "Reading Ourselves to Death," and the premise is that our brains are really not currently wired in such a way to take in so much information via text.
I think you are correct -- that we should feel good about a friend's vacation, or ideal job. However, in real life, we are exposed to those things in a much more limited way: you meet a friend for coffee and they show you photos of their trip, or a good friend calls to share their joy at the new job. Yes, absolutely, emotionally healthy humans should feel good about that. However, social media skews the equation, heavily. First, EVERYONE on your feed is posting how great their lives are, and, second, how many of those great lives are carefully curated for public consumption? When you are doing life with other people, yes, you share the joys and moments for celebration, but you likely also share the hard times that don't make it to social media. It really helps to know other people experience the same sorts of disappointment and pain that you do.
and that "good feeling" is mostly a lie, something we tell ourselves, because of our education, if our education was not biased by some made-up belief, we should feel nothing, not good, not bad, because we should not care about it. What other people do with their lives - in reality - has no impact on our life at all.
But we were all thought to poject. Unfortunately people mostly project their frustrations on others.
The only way to actually feel good about something that people share, it's to share it, like in person, in real life, not passively receive it on a screen.
If watching a screen full of "good news" would actually improve people's mood, it would be recommended by WHO like with vaccines.
yeah, that's part of education, it's not really what we should feel, because we don't know!
Social media are just suspension of disbelief for the masses, we are looking through the keyhole, it should be obvious that what we're looking at it's a fabrication and nothing is real.
It's like those truth-vs-reality posts about social media pictures.
It's so obvious when you think about it for a moment: we don't believe that the ice cream in the ADs is actually THAT good, why we should believe that self promotional material on social media it's any better?
My humble opinion.
I am happy and content, log on to facebook and see posting like this.
Something something….
Dastart Putin.
Dead people because you didnt wear a mask.
Dead children ( Syria a few years ago, Ukraine now ).
Something antivaxxer.
Something texas abortion law.
Someone parked like an idiot.
My childrens amazing <insert brag here>.
Some snyde humour picture, usually something about a republican. Posted by a non US person to a feed full of europeans.
And it goes on. Facebook makes me want to vomit sometimes.
There is a huge difference. When we interact in person, we are building a mutual relationship. Your friend may tell you about their new job, but may chose to adjust the tone and information to be more sensitive to the layoff you just experienced. Online, you get unidirectional bragging that needs to be as engaging and exaggerated as possible to get promoted by the algorithm. Their new job becomes the pinnacle of a lifetime of stellar achievement. If people interacted in person like they do on social media, the rest of us would avoid them like a contagious rash.
You only see the good online for the most part. In person, when they tell you about the amazing vacation, you hear about how their kid cried all the way on the 6 hour flight and how the wife got sick while over there. When they tell you about the new job, they also tell you how even though it is going great, they don't know about their new coworker that is being really annoying.
Online is 99% the good stuff (or the controversial stuff), in real life it is more nuanced and complex. I saw a bunch of relatives recently that I hadn't seen in about 4 years. I have 2 cousins that have kids that I see in pictures playing together all the time, and it makes me happy, but a bit guilty because my only child was born at a time where there are no cousins around his age. Turns out there's a bunch of stress in the relationship because the two groups of kids fight more than play.
Another cousin stayed in the corner, because he's a major MAGA guy and didn't want to interact with the more liberal rest of the group, obvious from his Facebook posts. Except that isn't the case at all, he's actually still divorcing his wife I thought he divorced 4 years ago, fighting a custody battle, and dealing with an injury where his company doesn't believe is worth him being off work for. Again, nuance and complexity adds humanity.
After reading The Last Psychiatrist's _Sadly, Porn_ I'd say that it's the performative nature of social media. In the social media environment you're reading projected images -- performances designed to appeal to the infinite audience of the platform. When you interact with someone in real life, there's an authentic communication between two people. You at least have the chance to really connect, ask questions, and have a real human conversation.
The in person conversations are much less likely to be embellished and polished to look like more than they are. The in person conversations are also a form of two-way communication, rather than something more like a person standing on the street corner shouting into a megaphone to catch the attention of anyone nearby. The human interaction makes a world of difference.
Also the in person conversations are probably spread out. They'd typically not all happen within the span of a couple of minutes, not giving you time to process and work through each emotion.
Unless you're at a party or something, and a lot of people do find parties overwhelming.
You're meeting a friend in an hour, so you enjoy your moment for a while before you see them
You spend time with a friend and are happy for them. After you bump into your coworker and chat for 20 mins about politics. Interesting, but you disagree. But you have lunch with a neighbour soon, so off you trot to go see their holiday pictures. All looks lovely yada yada yada - 1 even after the other, can being digested with context. Time is taken to enjoy or question certain things.
You are enjoying your moment for 1 minute. You open your phone and scroll facebook. You see all of that within 1 viewport. You haven't enjoyed your moment for long - you haven't enjoyed other's success cos you're still kinda angry about the political post etc.
IMO It's all about your mindset. You can look at a travel photo that your friend took and depending on your mindset, you're either going to feel jealous and wishing you could do the same or feel happy for that person.
> bad but they prefer to feel bad rather than not feel anything at all
this is possible.
But also FOMO makes them feel worse than feeling bad about what they read online.
For many people social networks are a conversation topics, for some it's the only thing they talk about, if they know nothing about what's happening, they're out of the social game, even IRL.
People like sad and scary movies because they can experience powerful emotions in a safe environment. Scary minus being in danger is exciting. It’s not to avoid emotional boredom.
> First, you notice a friend's post stating that she has accepted her ideal job.
> You continue browsing and see a video of your neighbour enjoying a fantastic tropical vacation.
> And now your cousin has uploaded a before and after photo that makes you want to hide your thighs for the rest of your life.
Sorry to say, but if a person shares a positive thing that's happened to them, and their "friend" makes that about themself in a negative way, the problem isn't really the delivery mechanism (social media)
this isn't a problem of social media but rather a problem of following current affairs. the cost of publishing has become so low that even news media dedicate whole articles to single tweets (and other social media posts by famous people). devout followers of social media (and perhaps news media, both television and internet) have become addicted to knowing/following the current thing. one can visit/use twitter, facebook, &c everyday without keeping in sync with the current things and/or allowing themselves to be tossed about like a boat in a tempest. curate deliberately. follow few things and people.
Everyone follows few things and people. You don't even know the names of all the pop stars to follow let alone their drama... or the news in every language you don't speak...
Morbid curiosity sometimes makes me seek out death and decay on the internet. Could this be the secret to my happiness?
But seriously, you can self-reflect about you constantly comparing yourself to to others and and some point you really should ask yourself what you want yourself. Even if you assume that the self-presentation of people on the net is honest, winning the social media competition is an illusion.
Not if you train your feeds to be high signal. Facebook has an 'unfollow' feature which enables you to mute people you don't like, but still have them as a friend (for whatever reason, went to school together once, or they're a colleague etc). As for Twitter, I just curate a bunch of Lists and avoid their algorithmic timeline and 'suggested' content.
Your describing social media as something that happens _to_ you.
You should probably make it something you _choose_ to use. Too political rant? Skip it. Video of nothing relevant? Skip it. Your cousins photos? If you know they're not for you, why are you consuming them every time they drop?
You choose to take your hands of the wheel, of course your going to be taken for a ride.
I'm a bit immune to a lot of this because I don't like travel, jobs of any kind, having family, excessive fitness (the one you need to excercise to get) and facebook does fairly good job of exposing me only to rants that confirm my biases. But this also makes Facebook way less engaging for me because it does invoke barely any feelings in me.
This comment and the replies to it make me think there is a lot of undiagnosed depression. I would feel happy for the good fortune of my friends and family and mute the politics off my timeline. If my friends or family did something that I wanted for myself, I would feel inspiration, not envy.
It affects you a lot less once you realize that nothing of that pictures a real, complete story of those peoples' lives, but just a cherry picked show-off moments and emotional venting...
Shouldn't we work as a society towards a type of education that promotes self confidence (more than self esteem) and makes an effort to reduce bragging ?
I think the roller coaster is not as much as an issue as the fast context switching and the hard labour you need to do to make sense of the things you see.
You can't have prolonged and deeper thoughts about anything because you are bombarded with refined extreme opinions and events.
Just yesterday, I was getting ready to do some work I noticed a tweet from an antivaxxer retweeted by a cryptobro saying "they cannot hide it forever, data leaks" and it was about insurance companies claims. The data was legit, indeed there was a huge rise in young people claims for dying off from non-covid condition. Wow, are the antivaxxers right, is the vaccine causing young people to die off from heart attacks? Now I have to dig the data and as it turns the rise in deaths started way before the vaccine roll out, about the beginning of the pandemic and it looks like it is related to drugs.
Because I followed some cryptobro to keep the pulse of the cryptobroverse, I had to endure doubt about what I knew was true, I had to fear for my life and for the loved ones and I had to spend precious time and mental energy because someone used misrepresentation of statistics to push an agenda. I was too exhausted to do any work.
I don't see how this could healthy. I don't see how I simply assume that it was false and ignore it because it will end up me missing out on everything outside of my bubble. I don't see how I can spend that much energy to fight off every single bullshit that is cheap to produce and expensive to clean up.
I don't see how this is sustainable. In real life, bullshitters are ousted by the communities but in this artificial communities we don't have the tools fight back.
For me, I've found that social media doesn't affect my level of happiness and/or anxiety directly. What it does do, is take up a lot of my time almost imperceptibly - leaving less time for other, more meaningful activities. It makes me feel like I'm running out of time every day, which in turn causes a feeling of anxiety.
I think social media is like our generations tobacco, everyone uses it and it is considered fashionable and cool but eventually it will start to come to light how unhealthy and insidious all the data harvesting, time sinks and gamifying social interactions at scale can be, especially with children who have much of the spare time to dedicate to it.
I'd argue it's more similar to cocaine. Tobacco is unhealthy, but the consequences were somewhat intuitive long before being proven (repeatedly cycling smoke through the lungs is intuitively unhealthy), and the real health effects aren't especially visible except over long time frames and with large samples.
By contrast, the shifts in behavior, effects, and downsides, of cocaine become apparent extremely rapidly and it's consumed in a way that makes it less obvious of the dangers. Vin Mariani [1] was a popular wine created in the mid 19th century. It's advocates included royalty, Popes, Thomas Edison, Ulysses S Grant, and countless others. It was wine mixed with cocaine. That wine itself also served as the inspiration for Coca-Cola - Coke, whose name derived from its two primary ingredients: Cocaine + Kola Nut.
Employers would give their workers cocaine to improve productivity, individuals themselves would use it (or various common products containing it) for similar ends, or just simple recreation. And we basically had a society where a large chunk of people were frequently coked out. But it was undoubtedly difficult to realize how absurd we all were because when something becomes ubiquitous, what do you have to compare it against?
And I think that's much closer to the reality we now live in where the impacts of social media are rather extremely evident on both a micro and macro scale, yet not only is the vast majority of society already hooked on it - but the people in power with the capacity to curtail its ails are themselves just as addicted to it, or alternatively exploiting it for their own personal benefit.
And much like non-smokers are effected by smokers (particularly when they were the majority) non-social media users are still affected in the sense that it has completely changed and polarised our politics, social/justice issues etc.
It's much worse than tobacco. At least tobacco only kills people when they're older, whereas social media robs young people of their mental health while simultaneously threatening truth and democracy
This seems to be the latest topic from the outrage machine. Can you explain how social media is an actual threat to the democracy or democratic process to a reasonable person?
Roughly 50% of the population in the US have an absolute distrust of the media, election results, and science. But wrap something up in a meme and post in on Facebook and it's treated like Gospel.
Here's something that's extremely disturbing to me.
"Republicans have become the purveyors of misinformation, and when our two-party system is broken like that, democracy is seriously in trouble. The president acknowledged that it's time to actually start doing things and maybe taking some names and putting people in jail."
I would say jailing press for printing things the government doesn't like is way more obvious a threat to democracy than the information they publish. This is no longer a slippery slope if this guy would even consider uttering this on national TV. We would be going into pretty blatant authoritarianism.
I was originally going to write a whole drawn out thing, but I realized it wasn't necessary.
One interesting aspect to think about on how social media affects democracy is the aspect of education. I can't find the video right now, but I remember seeing or maybe reading a post that said how you watch all these videos on all these topics ranging from math to economics to civil engineering etc, and you build this false perception of "oh yeah I know this shit", but really you don't, you know one summary that was presented to you.
Those channels: Tom Scott, Johnny Harris, 3B1B, etc. Are all amazing in the time they spend learning their material and then producing such high quality instruction, but even if you watched an hour long video on econ you still wouldn't be an economist. A lot of us know this, but there are a lot of us that don't, and we then go to vote on bills and politicians thinking we know the implications of our actions and how it might affect the country when we really don't.
Of course this isn't just a conversation about social media and it can devolve into a conversation about the dangers of an uneducated democracy overall. But I feel that social media definitely contributes to this false sense of educated that a lot of people have, pair that with echo chambers, misinformation, and an addictive formula and you've got a troublesome future.
> Can you explain how social media is an actual threat to the democracy or democratic process to a reasonable person?
The best explanation I've read of this is Tim Urban's "The Story of Us" series [1]. It builds up a model from individual behavior to societal behavior and how it's changed over the decades due to how online interactions have shifted behavior (both individual and societal).
I don't know whether it's the right or wrong model and explanation, but he lays it out very clearly.
I read that series when it first came out, so it's been a while. Forgive me if it's hazy. I completely understand the political divide and how it started in the late 80s. Limbaugh was really the frontrunner of our modern version of it. Fox took his model and applied it to TV. Many traditional news companies adopted that model for the left, and here we are. Social media is really just an extension of that.
I'm not sure how it's a threat to democracy though. I certainly don't believe it originated on social media either. People on both sides repeat some really dumb shit, but that's always been the case.
> Social media is really just an extension of that
This is true, however extensions are by their very nature different than the thing they're extending.
Social media is an extension to traditional media at a scale, speed, and attack vector (friends, family, community) which humans are much more vulnerable to
People are pretty vulnerable to the garbage that passes for news in the last 20+ years. I'm not so sure "fixing" (read censoring) social media will solve any of this, even if it was possible. The outrage machine will still exist in traditional news media, but they won't have to worry about new technologies unseating them. I'm not sure that is a good thing. Social media, to me, seems like just a comment section to current events, most of which are presented from traditional media.
FWIW, I haven't used social media since Snowden, so I don't know what it looks like today compared to 9 or so years ago.
It might be worth your time to explore outside the realm of singular, anecdotal, HN comments and dive a bit into the history and research. Good luck to you, friend!
>It might be worth your time to explore outside the realm of singular, anecdotal, HN comments and dive a bit into the history and research. Good luck to you, friend!
I don't buy the statement that social media is a threat to democracy. I think it's a political football and used hyperbolically in an attempt to normalize further censorship of people and press. I was hoping for at least one reasonable example of how social media is literally a threat to democracy to ease my mind, but I have yet to see a convincing one. I would say if anything, government censoring press and citizens is significantly more of a threat to democracy than garbage people post on social media that most people can see through.
You've also stated that you aren't up to date on the latest information around the topic. I've recommend you familiarize yourself and even provided resources (Cambridge Analytica, Social Dilemma).
It seems you're incredibly invested in this conversation. Take this time and passion to learn about it.
When you say reasonable person, do you mean layman? If so, watch the Social Dilemma. There was Cambridge Analytica and other countless misinformation campaign examples
To add to your idea, social media shares a deep property with tobacco: people know it’s bad and keep consuming it. Part of the reason is soft social pressure: nobody wants to be the odd one out by quitting.
I suppose if you take $10 as the price of a pack of cigarettes and $15/hr as the wage earned, then you could argue 2/3 of an hour of leisure time/personal life is lost per pack purchased/smoked.
You should see the wonders of the smoke breaks some 'senior' people had in the first consulting firm I worked for. One cigarette here, one cigarette there... aaand that wraps it up for the day, here's hoping the interns did some actual work.
Yes, few people probably aren't affected by social media just like smoking & drinking. But from my personal experience many people really feel jealous/unhappy/lonely when they look on false reality. And, those influencer really makes everything worst.
For me it’s not the fake people showing off, it’s all the news, drama and doom. And arguably it’s all irrelevant anyway. As an Australian, if I had known nothing about Ukraine, BLM protests, Trump, Kyle Rittenhouse, etc, my life would be no bit worse or less informed. It would probably be a bit better. But if I check social media it’s just a non stop stream of crap.
I switched my Twitter Trends location to Falkland Islands and my feed to "Latest Tweets". I guess this technically now is a filter bubble, but I don't feel like I have the obligation to expose myself to algorithmic content and its generated outrage.
When I was a kid and new to FB, someone told me to check the comments on the meme pages. They used to be funny and I thought that I had been missing out. So I made a habit of checking comments of all the posts.
Now it is a cesspool of trolls everywhere.
Now checking comments used to generate so many negative emotions in me that I have told myself the same - "never look at the comments". I feel happier now.
This is the kind of stuff that ends up filling my news feed. None of it has ever had any real effect on my life but it all seems to get equal feed real estate on reddit/twitter
Unsure about that.. I don't think Australia has been isolated from the rippling effects of price increases of grain and energy, that is one effect of the war in Ukraine. Probably not as much affected as many other countries, but I think you would still import products from countries where these effects are significant, and which have had to raise their prices due to it.
As someone out of Asia, the information the previous poster mentioned has near zero relevance to me. Barely any ripples from the events happening with the topics mentioned.
But still for some reason my feed is flooded with that news and it feels like there is a lot pressure to take a stand on topics I neither understand nor care about.
Social Media feels suffocating at times, it is like teenage peer pressure multiplied by a factor of 100.
But none of that is likely to be actionable information for them.
It's like hearing that meteor is going to kill us all tomorrow and there is nothing you can do. Sure, it's going to affect you, but your life isn't going to be any better if you know.
Certainly, if you only want to hear about actionable information, you can strike out most of news all together. You can pick up a history book in 30 years to read up on what was happening in the world. Perhaps you will be happier for it, I don't know.
This is called uninformed voter - the one that votes on what went on 100 years ago, but ignores what contemporary parties and politicians actually do.
For the record, I did skipped news entirely for few years. Yes, I did not knew about some things that may be stressful to know about. I was also dumb af when it came to voting or just generally having opinion on what is going on. This sort of person is super easy to manipulate, because missing context accumulates. So I do read them ever since, because I dont want to be that kind of voter.
Doubt that. I’ve lived through some changes of the ruling party in my current country, the only changes I’ve observed were: 1) would taxes be 49.9% or 50.1%, 2) in which exact foreign country our military will be waging or supporting another useless war.
Compare that to the price of the stock of your company…
> yet you cannot change it, at all.
Oh, you can. I’ve changed the politics around me twice already: 1) I’ve participated in overthrowing the government- result was good for me, but not so good for the whole country, 2) I’ve swapped a country - that worked dramatically good, both for me and my new country. So use recipe 1 with extreme caution, but recipe 2 looks safe to recommend.
> in my country there are huge differences in legislation between legislatures of right or left parties.
Really? Somewhere in Europe? But I still doubt that these differences are something that “most impacts your life”. Let’s compare with the stock price of the company you are working in, e.g.
Reports on price increases on grain and energy is not the same as minute details on troop movements and artillery hits or interviews with various retired US generals and former Russian officials.
The price increases started before the invasion and have more to do with the printing of money during corona. But people forget quickly, despite social media.
Yeah you need to start over if you plan to continue using social media at all
You’re stuck in a filter bubble thats irrelevant to you
If you start over, dont follow the same people, dont import your contacts, dont give it the same phone number, even for one time passcodes, dont use the same email address
If you're in the US, you'd be highly attuned to these events and putting them together would be a striking dissonance. But really the common trait of these events is that they are widely reported by US media but aren't really consequential or actionable to an ordinary person anywhere else in the world (excluding the war in Ukraine, which is also consequential in parts of Europe).
Tabloid magazines that only talk about the rich and celebrities have always been super popular which also makes people depressed. I think this is nothing new with social media.
Ugh. I’m not even on Facebook or active on Twitter and I have the same. I need to read the newspaper. Then I need to know the Economist’s and The Guardian’s and the NY Times’ view on the daily news as well. Plus I need to keep up to date on the COVID situation and the war in Ukraine. Oh and I’m also behind on Better Call Saul. And I need to watch 1917 and Dune. And I want to read at least 10 pages in a novel every day. And my RSS feeds.
Oh, and I have a full time job and I need to exercise and I want to be in bed by 23:00.
As for your news issues, I'd honestly go with the approach of never reading information about breaking stories. Most often breaking stories aren't breaking and they rarely have the full picture.
By delaying your news consumption a few days (or even a week) you'll have a much better picture of the news with the benefit of never needing to "keep up."
Also my personal opinion, very often the news isn't relevant. The decade defining stories don't happen every day and there's very few stories that require your immediate attention, versus say your weekly attention.
That's why I'm a big fan of Delayed Gratification (someone posted this on HN a few months back):
Do you/does anyone think this is something you would use?
I'm working on My Productive Homepage, a custom dynamic homepage you can set and customize the exact topics and goals that you care about. It will recommend unseen info/updates on only those things and display info in summary form (with links to sources).
No distracting or trending news unless they are highly relevant to the topics/goals you explicitly choose. We intend to maximize user productivity, rather than engagement.
I believe it can help people stay focused on what really matters to them while getting updates and stimulated, and discover useful info for work or serious hobbies.
(And in work mode, it'd be a homepage you can open without guilt while at work. ;))
What important features would you like to get on such a custom, dynamic homepage?
Comments about the project in general would also be appreciated, eg on how helpful or unhelpful you think the project will be to you or people you know.
Yes, I have seen the same pattern with myself. Tiktok makes me happy in moderation. But when it starts to displace too much of my life and I get less social interaction, exercise, etc, then I start to have some depressive symptoms. This would be more of an indirect cause.
I think there are also a lot of people for whom social media is a direct cause of anxiety, especially young women.
I mainly use it to fill the time to be honest, spare moments here and there in between work and video games lol. That and taking my mind off things at work, which probably says a lot about my job satisfaction. But I'm starting a new job in a few weeks so we'll see how it goes, if it fits my activity on HN and co will drop significantly.
> I've found that social media doesn't affect my level of happiness and/or anxiety directly.
American privilege? Each time a war flares up in my home country I am going into a pretty deep depression. And the only cure is to switch off the Telegram. Which is frankly rather hard to do, but possible. A third week going strong…
I fast from food for a month a year due to religious reasons (from dawn to dusk). During this time,I fast from social media (telegram, twitter mostly).
After about a week, I feel anxious at a superficial level but it levels off and I feel much better about 2 weeks in. After the whole month, when I log into twitter again, I can really feel a mental shift. Almost like being dragged back into it. It's not pleasant. I'm not surprised by these findings.
I'm curious, do you also tend to fast from news sources, if you follow any? HN, BBC, stuff like that. Things that aren't social media but might have a similar effect where you get overwhelmed or anxious from the information.
I don't think people are getting overwhelmed or anxious from the information, but rather from the way that information is presented. The past was, in nearly every measurable way, vastly worse than the present. In the span of a single life you go from WW1 to the Spanish Flu to the Great Depression to WW2 to the very real threat of nuclear annihilation which nearly came to be multiple times.
And you didn't need to seek out information on this. You were likely directly affected by some of these events. If you weren't, you certainly knew somebody who died or was otherwise severely affected themselves. I mean think about COVID and then bump up its impact exponentially. And then imagine living through events of this scale over and over and over and over again. That is what people in the past lived through.
Today you can present data impartially, or emotionally. Emotional narrative gives a million clicks, a million shares, and drives extreme "engagement" that is a hair's breadth away from mob mentality. You can also present data impartially, which drives little more than a more informed society. It's not a surprise which path we take.
> Today you can present data impartially, or emotionally. Emotional narrative gives a million clicks, a million shares, and drives extreme "engagement" that is a hair's breadth away from mob mentality. You can also present data impartially, which drives little more than a more informed society. It's not a surprise which path we take.
You also forgot the part where it's not in any of their interests to produce anything impartial. 100% of it is propaganda for someone or another, even the stuff pretending to be "impartial."
Yeah. The OP was specifically about social media and regular news outlets mimic the highly addictive techniques used there to sell their own news. The medium, after all, is the message and I was specifically talking about how staying away from it feels good and going back feels bad.
When I first moved off the social media sites, I went to google news to "stay informed". I had enough self awareness to realise that I was treating it more or less the same way I was treating twitter so I stopped looking at those too.
Something akin to FOMO. I feel "out of touch". I don't like it 100% but there are some benefits to it. The platform itself doesn't encourage the beneficial behaviours though. It just tries to get you hooked.
Nope. You can look at my profile to see that I don't "avoid mentioning" my faith. At the same time, I don't like to wave it around everwhere either. Just didn't think it was relevant to the point being discussed. I'm on a few groups where non Muslims tried out the fast (physical and intellectual) and had positive results so I wanted to emphasise that rather than ramadhan itself.
I've been away from facebook and instagram for about 4 years. Never caught the tik-tok or snapchat train, so the only consumption i do is light reddit and hackernews. The weirdest thing for others is that I can sit indefinitely without having to look at my phone and actually get lost in thoughts or even get bored.
The downside is that it can isolate you. Where I live, if you're not on instagram you don't exist. My girlfriend is more up to date with what my colleagues are up to, even though I spent 8 hours a day with them in the same office.
I find this to be a good motivator to make better interactions with co-workers & friends. Since giving up FB/Instagram I've found conversations with friends to be much more engaging and fulfilling
I am in the exact same situation for the past 2 years. My mood is vastly improved. The social media isolation aspect is as important as the social media socialization aspect to me. Not important.
The people I want to talk to are on discord or signal, and we do actual activities together
This! I have a good friend of mine who is very active on Instagram and tiktok, where I don't have an account. But the fact that we are doing activities together makes us close. Real life exists, and it's infinitely better than whatever the social app of the moment is.
I would have to agree, I also gave up Instagram/Facebook because I noticed it impacting my mental health.
The only thing I miss is the early days of Facebook when it was just humans being human, and posting pictures of them being silly or with their family instead of flexing about newly acquired money/status, etc. But maybe that's just me remembering with rose tinted glasses.
Personally it's hard to understand if quitting SM changed my emotional response to a lot of things or if it is me who changed in time. It doesn't help that the agenda and techniques used by these platforms evolve all the time to find new ways to hook you in
At Facebook / Meta, employees often questioned Mark Zuckerberg whenever a study like this came out. Zuckerberg noted that the same held true for news media. Reporters do not like to mention this.
Sure. But in the same way that 24 hour news networks are an obvious detriment compared to brief half hour or hour long "evening news" programs, social media's patterns to keep you engaged are also a detriment compared with, say, a quick text to the people you care about checking in. There's a real positive buried in there, but the financial incentive to capture eyeballs turns it into a negative.
"Studies have linked poor mental health to news exposure during negative and traumatic events such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters; the more news a person consumes during and after these events, the more likely they are to suffer from depression, stress and anxiety. For example, a 2014 study surveyed 4,675 Americans in the weeks following the Boston Marathon bombings and collected data on how much media they consumed. Participants who engaged with more than six hours of media coverage per day were nine times more likely to also experience symptoms of high acute stress than those who only watched a minimal amount of news."
Kinda agreeing with me though? I said "doesn't matter as much".
Case in point, I think someone that watches 1 hour of news about the Boston Marathon bombings is going to be worse off than someone who watches 12 hours of news that happens to be mildly positive. The problem is (as I said) that the news these days is almost entirely negative, because that is what sells.
The news has always been "almost entirely negative", even when the only source was newspapers. But being informed of what's going on, vs being clueless; there's a societal benefit in having an informed citizenry.
This does presume that that half hour or hour is not a purely editorial function (think Walter Cronkite vs Tucker Carlson), and that the goal is to actually cover the news of the world, not create partisan wedges and glue eyeballs (again, same comparison). But even if it's negative, understanding what is going on matters, and is likely a net gain for society, with a minimal individual cost.
What isn't a net gain is being so consumed by world events (or worse, editorialized versions of world events) that you lose sight on your personal world, and are unable to enjoy the moments around you. A similar effect is at play with social media.
> he news has always been "almost entirely negative", even when the only source was newspapers
This doesn't ring true for me at all.
What percentage of broadsheets were dedicated to crime/murder back in the day? Now estimate the same for crime/murder being covered in the local evening news.
From my experience it's not even close. Broadsheets were actually informative, cable news is a lot of fear-mongering.
Depends on the news source. There is a noticeable difference between Tweets and unverified Facebook posts, news media from Buzzfeed or Salon, articles from a local newspaper, articles from The New York Times/Washington Post, and articles from the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal.
Not all news is designed for outrage. Several publications publish in-depth articles in a neutral way, where you can actually learn something. Investigations are also often genuinely useful for a better society. Zuckerberg's position therefore doesn't hold true for all news media.
Separately, depending on how your social media feed is set up, you can be feel jealous/lesser due to seeing the high points of the lives of people you know (depending on your personality type), seeing news on your feed, or seeing neither due to subscribing to accounts in niche fields.
And you could say the same about social media. I'm on facebook. I get no outrage. I unfollowed anyone who posts it and FB doesn't insert any. As an example right now my FB feed is:
> Picture of a the blood moon eclipse a friend took
> A Picture of a CD cover of a song a friend is listing too
> Pictures from my sister visiting her best friend in another state.
> A funny gif from a friend making fun of crypto crashing
> A poster of the new Japanese Ultraman movie and a friend saying he saw it and really enjoyed it and is looking forward to the Masked Rider movie.
> More pictures from my sister
> A collection of doodles from an artist friend
> A picture of my sister with 2 x-neighbors I haven't seen in 35 years
> A friend saying he loved the video game "The Final Station"
> More pics from my sister
> A friend posting a link to a music video she loves
> A friend posting about a game they made at a game jam
> A friend saying he started doing trip planning for families going to Disneyland.
> My aunt posting a picture of flowers my uncle bought her.
> A friend posting about a show he went to in Argentina
> My sister posting a words of wisdom type picture
> A friend posting he can't believe he's had the same job he loves for 8yrs already
> A friend posting an artist concept drawing of Cassini taking a picture of Saturn
> A friend who makes one off dresses on etsy posting her latest creations
> A friend posting he likes "Picard" but it should have had a "Shut up, Wesley" scene.
No outrage in my feed.
To put it another way, social media is what you make of it. If you don't want the outrage the stop following the outrage.
I've stopped going to facebook myself because even though a lot of it for me was like that (and no outrage or politics, that's just outrage and edge cases that filter onto aggregators like reddit), I noticed at some point that a third was Facebook ads, and another third ads made by other people.
I'm latching onto your post because a number of those are advertisements / promotions; social media has turned a lot of people into unpaid marketeers. In a sense, I mean I get that people are fans of e.g. TV shows, but still. Anyway here's some that I think are advertisements in disguise:
> A Picture of a CD cover of a song a friend is listing too
> A poster of the new Japanese Ultraman movie and a friend saying he saw it and really enjoyed it and is looking forward to the Masked Rider movie.
> A friend saying he loved the video game "The Final Station"
> A friend posting a link to a music video she loves
> A friend posting about a game they made at a game jam
> A friend saying he started doing trip planning for families going to Disneyland.
> My aunt posting a picture of flowers my uncle bought her.
> A friend posting about a show he went to in Argentina
> A friend who makes one off dresses on etsy posting her latest creations
> A friend posting he likes "Picard" but it should have had a "Shut up, Wesley" scene.
This kind of reads like an ad for Facebook. It sounds way to ideal. My feed is just reposted meme pages with the occasional baby and vacation picture thrown in
That does not seem controversial. However Facebook/Instagram does not allow you to only see results for friends you follow. Explore page, ads, recommended posts, shorts, reels pepper your news feed. And your friends posts are also sorted with the intention of maximum engagement, not relevance.
To add to this. I don't watch the news anymore (maybe that makes me a bad person). I also rarely read it (except for hacker "news") but... Every few weeks I visit my mom for a few days and she wants to watch the news around 10pm. It always massively over hyped violence, crime, political outrage, and it's funny, in a sad way, that she always gets upset at it and ask her why she keeps watching. She says "for the weather" to which I reply (you can ask your ipad/iphone) but she keeps doing it even though every night it's clearly upsetting her. I think it's a habit like she feels they day isn't over unless she ends the night with news, even though it's 90% designed for outrage and sensationalism.
That is the point of my comment: not all news sources are designed for clickbait. In contrast, consider The Financial Times's (FT's) headlines:
>Tiger Global slashes bets on tech groups after stock market sell-off
> News in-depth. Military briefing: why Russia and Ukraine are fighting over a Black Sea outcrop
> Investors pull $7bn from Tether as stablecoin jitters intensify
> Buffett buys $3bn Citi stake in value-hunting stock splurge
> Ethiopia atrocities cast long shadow as city of Lalibela prays for peace
> Qantas says synthetic fuel could power long flights by mid-2030s
Some of the news itself is tragic. But it's a false equivalence to claim that the headlines and article content between news sources (e.g. Washington Post vs. the FT) are equally outrage-provoking or informative. The Washington Post was listed in the middle because their articles are usually highly informative (from the number of interviewed people and documents analyzed), though their headlines are more clickbait.
Both The Washington Post or the FT are different from (typically) Salon, and each is a far cry from social media. Also, the debate of news media in place of discussing social media is exactly the effect that Zuckerberg intended with his comment.
Maybe try FT. Currently the Most Read headlines are:
- Bitcoin has no future as a payments network, says FTX chief
- Putin signals acceptance of Finland and Sweden joining Nato
- China’s economic activity plummets as Covid lockdowns hit growth
- "Russia learns a hard lesson about the folly of war"
- Harrow Beijing school loses its hallowed British branding
Or Wikipedia's Current events Portal:
- Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (pictured) is elected as President of Somalia.
- In the United States, ten people are killed in a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
- Ukraine, represented by Kalush Orchestra with the song "Stefania", wins the Eurovision Song Contest.
- Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan inherits the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and becomes President of the United Arab Emirates after the death of Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
I don't agree that it depends on the news source. The problem is consuming media and not acting on it. A person can use social media to inspire real positive change in their behaviors and their life, and a person can read in-depth, well-written articles about atrocities happening half-way around the world and just end up feeling powerless and depressed.
There are legitimate opportunities to act on the news. For example, I avoided a fairly convincing phishing attempt with my work email due to reading a relevant article in a mainstream newspaper. News can similarly help a person avoid scams and cons.
News also provides common conversational topics with different types of people. A lot of people in business read The Wall Street Journal, and it’s easier to find common talking points with them if I read the news (especially on news about their industry). Similarly, a lot of academics and people in education read The New York Times. Though reading the news isn’t necessary to start a conversation, it’s often an easy starting point.
My Twitter feed is basically the news. The first 4 of 5 posts are from established news organizations or about current events. Social media vs news media is a distinction without a difference.
Well no, not legally. Social media platforms have certain legal protections against litigation for their content while news organizations do not.
The distinctions are actually fairly profound and include established practices and professional norms concerning information sourcing, verification/due diligence, and editorial discretion. This is all before the agent-principal relationship, contractual obligations, and regulatory oversight to which news organizations are subject.
I understand why Zuckerberg needs to make the false equivalence, but we don’t (necessarily) share his profit motive and can be more objective here.
Firstly, traditional news media’s intrusion is not as severe or wide ranging. To give one example, the surge in teenage mental health problems that Facebook and Instagram in particular seem likely to have caused.
Second, there is a very large qualitative difference between social media and traditional media. Social media is monitoring your every action, and adapting to it, and creates a tight feedback loop where you are manipulated into staying engaged and consuming more adverts. That personalised real-time feedback loop, based on giant datasets that are very invasive, is incomparable to traditional media.
Finally, the extent of attention capture by social media cannot be compared to traditional media. This can be observed by simply taking a walk down the high street and seeing how many people are staring at their phones. Traditional media do use apps as a medium, but there aren’t many people who would seriously argue that most of those glued to their screens are likely to be reading an online newspaper and not looking at Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok.
The only doubt I have is whether Zuckerberg actually believes what’s he saying, in order to have a clean conscience, or whether it’s a cynical argument used to reassure his staff.
> Social media is monitoring your every action, and adapting to it, and creates a tight feedback loop where you are manipulated into staying engaged and consuming more adverts. That personalised real-time feedback loop, based on giant datasets that are very invasive, is incomparable to traditional media.
I just want to add here that YouTube, while not exactly a social medium and not a traditional medium, also has a tight and instantly adaptive feedback loop. With this argument, staying off YouTube should be similarly relieving than staying off at least TikTok. At least, the hours you can waste are comparable.
Yes, the correct headline and takeaway should be: "Taking a break from ALL media makes you happier", or rather, "go outside and spend time with real people".
While that’s true, it misses the point – which is that Facebook is consciously and painstankingly designed you keep to “engaged”. Sure, everyone wants to keep their website visitors, but what Facebook does is a different level. (And many media consider their readers to be their customers, not the goods being sold. That’s a huge difference.)
You hear this kind of equivalence made a lot: social media is no different than the newspaper, or the TV news. This never made sense to me. Obviously, some characteristic of social media persuaded people to drop their newspapers and turn of their televisions to use their phones instead. There must be something qualitatively different about social media on mobile devices that explains this.
The difference may be that it is better and more enlightening, or it may be that it is more addictive and intrusive. But, it is not the same.
My significant other has a news app "addiction". A lot of them now mimic the feeds of social medias. She went up to spending 6 hours a day scrolling down the infinite scroll until we noticed the issue.
It might be the case that the psychological process here is that making a conscious change to your lifestyle makes you happier and less anxious (temporarily?). If so then the same is true of literally anything.
I pretty much live in a box (apt no land). Always on the computer. I work a lot/work on projects. But then I hit that point where I can't do logical things/can't write more code. I can switch to physical projects or go to the park. But I really have been isolated from people I think since 2014 or so. I had a roommate for a few years after that then he moved out. I briefly worked jobs where you interacted with people day to day that helps with comradery.
Lately though I'm getting tired of the scrolling/point driven life. I still can't make the jump yet (get property so I can spend most of my free time outside). Still social media is nice to pass the time and along with YT/TV, to fill that social void. In the past I've found it weird to be around people like I don't know what is normal and usually can't stand the slowness of the moment. Then it's super weird when you're in a crowded place ha (usually freaks me out).
This is why when the internet dies I can't stand it... I remember my life how it's constantly using the internet to be in that state of motion. I'm not saying internet bad. Idk I'm like 3/10 of the way through life so far, I gotta see what is considered worth still.
I definitely agree that getting a property is a good idea. I feel much better and it's easier to stay away from news & social media whenever I go to countryside, where I have lots of free space and things to do outside. In an apartment there are only so many things one can do, and too many screens nearby, especially for a remote-worker like me.
Maybe urban life works for some people, but it definitely causes boredom to me, and social media & news are a distraction from that.
HN has been a significant contributor to my cynicism. There have been enough submissions in the past where I already knew what to expect from the comments section, especially in cases where my stance on the matter is already firm/obvious (such as with tech regulation, climate change, complaints about Twitter threads being reposted to HN, articles about social media dooming us like this one).
My reaction to these cases is typically along the lines of "yes, we know this bad, but what's going to change? What does continuing to complain here accomplish?" It's largely the same mechanism as those other toxic media platforms, and yet HN often falls for it as well. The band of people who decry Twitter et al. at the usual opportunities has persisted for years at this point, and they are unlikely to ever exit this community for good. Yet it's trivial from force of habit to click through to the comments anyway and continue to expose oneself to the usual negativity.
And I don't even use Twitter anymore - it's not like I disagree with many of those negative opinions. But after years and years of reading the same tired arguments, that negativity seems to transcend its original context to worm its way into your thought process as a general, persistent haze.
Every time I see a Firefox announcement of any kind I know the top comment will be a link to bugzilla showing some 15 year old bug that the commenter thinks is absolutely critical or something about the CEOs pay.
Maybe if you are lucky, page 2 has comments about the actual article.
I have a similar experience with anything related to Google or GCP - click through and there are endless comments about Google shutting down products and how people would never use them or how the customer support is bad.
However, I have noticed that this trend is starting to change so there is hope! I am not sure if it is because the HN community has changed, or if Google has changed its public perception (unlikely I expect)
>"Snark aside, why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters?"
The topic is related to technology (and thus easier to justify as relevant to the forum) and has a low barrier of entry to discuss. A significant majority of people in Western countries use social media and it doesn't require technical knowledge, so it's easier to share opinions about it.
Reading HN threads on social media is almost like consuming junk food: the arguments are predictable but comfortable and easy to digest. It's enjoyable in a perverse way, though not a real source of growth as the ideas aren't as hard to struggle with (versus threads on more technical topics).
I think many people want to spend less time consuming media ('social' or otherwise) and more time interacting with the physical world/people. But it is difficult to do that these days because there is endless attention-grabbing media to consume and that is what it feels like everyone else is doing so it becomes the default.
HN hits the same buttons as reddit for me, that is, compulsion to constantly refresh to see if there is something new, karma goes up, or I've gotten replies, so no, HN isn't any different, though it has less of the toxicity and low or no-value comments.
Society's opinion of social media is by far the biggest boldest new pop-culture gazing-at-itself and snake-eating-it's-tale opportunity of the century. This is a cultural fixation, and one we've already largely convinced ourselves is awful & terrible & the source of great suffering. That it happens to be some pretty delinquent not great companies running the show is a great fuel for the bonfire, cause for pyrophilia.
> why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters?
Most of us would have doom scrolled in one form or another, many do it regularly, which can be hugely detrimental to life satisfaction in the same way any addiction could be, and can also increase anxiety. It's also in the interest of app makers to encourage these mostly destructive habits.
> Snark aside, why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters?
I think that there are too related patterns on HN and both have to do with tech culture. First, complains about loneliness and seeing loneliness as major problem. Second, looking down on socialization or at least ways other people socialize - whether social media or young students partying and socializing. So, any bad news about social media is welcome.
There is ethos of not socializing the wrong way or not at all. And ethos of not wasting your time with fluff, doing side project or getting better in something instead (and some amount of this is absolutely good) and of working a lot. And combination then it leads to kind of magical thinking of "if only other people did not used these, everything would be better".
I'd argue that it can include HN, but HN is not designed to be nearly as toxic, and actually goes out of the way to be "as not-toxic as possible without breaking the concept of what it's trying to be."
I've spent a while thinking through "What makes social media evil?" - I've read a number of studies, I grew up with the first wave of what we might call "social media" (never used MySpace but was quite familiar with it from friends, extensively used LiveJournal, etc). And my conclusion is that once you go away from "global state" to "individualized algorithmic feeds," it's probably gone evil.
HN, as far as I can tell, has a global state. There may be some replication delays (if it's hosted on multiple servers, which I simply don't know - I can't imagine it requires much in terms of resources to host), but "I see what you see what a non-logged in user sees," with only very, very few differences (flagged/dead posts, mostly). It's not reordering the state based on what it knows about me - it's reordering, globally, for all users, based on the consensus. The same was true of LJ - you had your own feed, but outside permission related differences, if I looked at a community and you did, we both saw the same thing.
This global state also means that there's no "slot machine" behavior of "pull the slider and see what's new." You refresh. It's the same stuff. Maybe two things switched positions. Go away, because it's simply not going to change that fast for you.
HN also doesn't go with the endless scrolling. There's a bottom of the first page. You have to make a deliberate decision to see beyond it, and that's something that historically was just "how things worked," but has been replaced with the bottomless bowl approach. We know that people, given a bottomless bowl of soup, eat more. And given that every ad revenue based social media company has gone to that model, clearly people consume more.
Humans are vulnerable to "metricification" quirks, and you see that with a lot of social medias too. HN only shows your up/down votes, and you can't see anything else. There's a demetrificator extension for it, though I would like the option to turn the metrics off in my profile.
And, finally, HN is "pull" - I have to go to the site, vs it reaching out with notifications to try and drag me back in. Plus, there's the noprocrast setting. It gives you the tools to make it a nuisance to use too much.
So, while HN can be somewhat addictive if you let it, the lack of any "weaponization of psychology" tricks and the very active "No, really, you've been looking at it too long, go away" coding means that I don't consider it particularly toxic, and certainly not in the same style as FB/Twitter/etc.
Why it's a recurring obsession? Probably because a lot of us have been in the tech industry, have seen how it works, have (probably) been addicted at some point, have watched the whole concept go from "Huh, this is kind of a neat way to connect with people I'd never talk to otherwise!" to "Braaaaaaiiiiiinss... via eeeeeyyyyyeeebaaaallllssss!" in the past 10-15 years, and really want no part of it anymore, and want to help ensure other people see it for the vile, human-toxic trash it is.
It'll destroy your ability to focus, make you less emotionally unstable, warp your view of reality in one of a variety of ways, suck basically all the time you let it, try with every trick in the book to addict you. And in exchange, some tech billionaires get another couple feet on their yachts. Yay?
> Humans are vulnerable to "metricification" quirks, and you see that with a lot of social medias too. HN only shows your up/down votes, and you can't see anything else. There's a demetrificator extension for it, though I would like the option to turn the metrics off in my profile.
Where's this extension? That seems useful (I'm susceptible to "metricification" - quit reddit because of it. He said, knowing that mentioning quitting reddit would probably net him at least 5 upvotes).
There's some real things I want to appreciate & root into here, but as a geek growing up, one of my greatest & most persistence annoyances was how easy & happy it was for so many around me to pick being so ignorant, so blind, so insular.
Heck yes ignoring the world & big matters makes you happier. Heck yes keeping blinders on & seeing less is safer, more secure, simpler.
But fuck that. Fuck ignorance. Face things, see the scope of things. I hated the choice of ignorance then. Today I can at least accept that there's validity in multiple paths. But when we dock the people opting into the world for the real emption, empathy, & pain they experiemce for trying to see more? This is a modern mind-poison. There's so little to be said for being aware, for caring, by any measurable form. But we should. Boiling everything down to what is good for the individual is insufficient to maintain a society & this view will keep going on and on and on and it's so gross, so deeply deeply inadequate & shit.
Edit: there's a lot of very very sorry followups with people with really shitty social feeds & want-anxiety. Yes, that is some people's experience. But it hasnt been what I've seen. It hasnt been what people I know experince. Some of the greater hazards I've seen have been a kind of para-societal living-in-the-event that some people have, without any real stake, but I generally dont see anywhere near the level of Fear Uncertainty or Doubt the social-network-panic comments widely want to freak us out about. There is a knowing, real, & reasonable wokeness & solidarity, and so little of the negative pressures in my feeds that others tout, the people everywhere around me from so many decades & places are so much more nuanced & in tune & multifaceted in their view of the affairs & goings on than the media. This demonization of social media is a panic I simply dont see, anywhere. I think society has warped itself into an unjustified & unreasonable frenzie against something that is far less scary than we & especially the media make it out to be.
Social media isn't the world, or a big matter. One can still read/engage with the news without having to deal with as many dark patterns. We don't have a public digital square, but I'm not going to help Zuckerberg et al further privatize it at my own mental expense.
idk about that, a lot of news sources feel like they're optimizing for clicks too. where is some boring neutral news? then am i to broken to even stick with something like at this point lol maybe i need the clickbait
i agree with the main point, social media isnt the world. i think people forget that
In print form. That comes to your physical mailbox.
Newspapers are OK, but magazines are better, if you want "State of the world, processed and digested, after the fact, without the outrage of the moment leaking in."
I subscribe to... honestly more than I get around to reading fully, but part of it is to simply say, "Yes, I value this type of writing and information, please keep producing it."
There are some news sources that are less click baity and partisan, such as Axios, DW, or Reuters. If you can read French, courrier international is decent too.
Courrier International is totally worth the reading and its concept is pretty smart : most of their article are just translated articles from foreign ( = not France based) newspapers. It allows the reader to get a view of the current topics from the outside of the country. Furthermore, by its nature of being translated, this newspaper have to be "slow" and can’t fall under the "breaking news" clickbait temptation.
If anything I think my social media feeds/friends have far far more nuance & balance, accept the duality of existence & show it off, far far far more than the bland & polemic media/news.
Imo the social media panic is mostly people afraid of genuineness & earnesty, or people jist afraid of an idea they dont at all have any connection to or understanding of.
There is a very very real problem that this world lacks accessible role models. That we dont know who to look to, that we dont have local examples. That's not a social media problem: that's just ehat happens when the well-to-do parts of the economy stratify up & up & up & real living gets trashy cheap & hard. Some people fall for the shallow signs that are projected, on social media or in other cultural distribution mechanisms (music is a big longstanding distributor of cultue for example). But the lack of real meaning far far far outstripsy concern with social mediacs ability to let shallow symbols spread.
I think that in the context of social media it is less about ignoring the world & big matters but rather that you're getting a very biased view of the things that in the end is often useless and cause no tangible behavioral change in you.
The "fuck ignorance, face things" can be used to shove information down someone's throat that adds nothing to the person's life except maybe misery.
Being informed about stuff you can do nothing about that won't cause any tangible behavioral change (except maybe adding stress and anxiety) is not novel for the sake of it.
A rock that can't move, act or communicate that know the truth of the world, or Kardashians family dynamics, is no better than a rock that don't.
When someone develops a distorted picture of the world and becomes an activist based on it, that's just as bad for society as if they had never activated in the first place. In fact you could make a case that it's worse, mass shooters tend to be highly ideological and have views that are at odds with reality.
The problem we have with social media (and to a degree traditional media as well) is that both the nature of the technology and the profit incentives of the platforms encourage shallow thinking and cognitive bias among users. Going from paper to screens was bad enough in terms of its documented effects on focus and comprehension. Add to that shrinking the screen down to the size of our palms, enforcing 280 character limits, amplifying the most outrageous voices etc. and I sometimes wonder how civilization is still intact!
I agree that people should maintain some form of awareness of social issues and participation in them, democracy doesn't work without this. But an information diet heavy on social media will promote a distorted awareness of the world. And time spent on social media feels significant but it doesn't actually effect change. Things that do include: voting, attending a protest, writing to your congressman, volunteering your time and labor, earning extra income which you can donate to a cause, etc.
There are a lot of ways to get informed, participate & influence society, social media is one of the worst. It's the junk food of activism.
1) The writer, Cal Newport, gets his news from reading a broadsheet newspaper cover to cover every morning. (Not in the link but he's written about it elsewhere). I think it would be hard to argue that he's less well informed than someone scrolling through reddit, let alone FB or Instagram.
2) He's also said, and I agree, that pre-2006 or so Twitter and FB were pretty benign social media and have a lot of positives. Critically, this is before they developed infinite scrolling style timelines which are setup to maximise engagement. They were just chronological feeds of things posted by people you chose to follow.
3) Similarly to (2), the way those algorithms are optimised is not to deliberately expose you to the views of a wider range of people than you affirmatively chose to follow (although they could be!) but to maximise eyeball-time regardless. It turns out that the way to do that is to let highly emotionally charged and extreme views rise to the top.
As a result, the things you see will be either things you violently agree with from your bubble or things likely to trigger an immediate counter-response from what I think of as your anti-bubble. The anti-bubble looks like diverse views but are actually just fully defined as the inverse of the bubble's views. This deadens the space for mutual political engagement.
I think that "social media" could do lots of great things if it worked differently but I just don't think that empirically it does.
I’m all for engagement in news, world events and deliberate conversations.
Social media seems different in that increased feed engagement (read: revenue) for these companies can be to feed into insecurities. That’s not informational, that’s predatory.
I would say that interacting with the physical world/people is much richer and more fulfilling than social media (or any other media). Being aware of 'the world & big matters' does not make a person good or interesting. What really matters is not what media a person consumes (or does not consume), but what they do.
You can certainly hear about a lot of things on social media, but I don’t think reading a bunch of underinformed, overangry people fire memes, half-truths, and occasional outright lies back and forth constitutes facing anything in any meaningful way, nor will it make any difference in the world.
The issue is the knowledge of bad things you cant change and wont impact your behavior at all just makes you informed and miserable.
Being informed is not a universal good, more is not always better. Should have a personal cost/benefit calculation, “is it worth it to be this informed?” Etc.
I think the nuance here might be in keeping your head still in the general news of the world but avoiding the things that cause "tribal syndrome" or anything with "keeping up with the joneses".
if you decide to experience the entire world, all the time, there's no respite from the awful. the human mind just isn't capable of handling that well.
Is HN considered "social media"? Because in many ways (at least for me), there's a resemblance - the never disappearing timeline, the comments that sometimes show the trenches of the good old culture wars...
It's definitely no Facebook. I guess HN (or HN admins, to be precise) is doing a better job at limiting the disagreements from "Petersburg troll-farm vitriol" to "occasionally sarcastic". But the social media effect is definitely there...
Despite what so many others are going to say, yes, it's social media.
It aggregates great things that others are doing along with other posts designed to elicit extreme emotions and feeds them to you with an algorithm designed to encourage engagement. (I had originally written "maximize", but HN's algorithm does at least try to prevent flamewars.)
> I guess HN (or HN admins, to be precise) is doing a better job at limiting the disagreements
I think users of this site disparage low effort/meme comments to the point that people typically stay on topic. Points of view are fairly nuanced and it seems effort is taken to understand and discuss.
I don't think HN fits to the "Social Media" of today. It's more of a slow churning RSS feed with comments underpinned by a strong social contract.
Another difference is, while we disagree, we don't fight bona fide flame wars. A more civilized and skilled discussion is favored here, and this is a very good thing (TM).
Feeling a lot of completed projects or new things kindle the impostor syndrome sometimes, but it's not creating the same insecurity of image based social platforms or "free for all" comment platforms.
I've first deleted reddit back then, then removed Instagram from my phone. I can say that I'm much happier. However, HN is not creating same type of tension for me.
I learn a lot of things, for a start.
I agree about the discussion being (mostly) civilized. But I'm really asking myself to what degree is this because of the admins dedication to their job and to what degree is this by design / users selection.
I'm in a few FB groups that are not too far of the mark either when it comes to the debate rules, but moderating one of them, I see that keeping things civilized is not really something one can automatize or put into an algorithm / ML magic.
Hence the parallel with HN. We tend to imagine social networks as apps / startups, but I don't think that's a full picture.
Of course, a social media is not limited to the "brands" everyone uses, but I wanted to separate them because most people think of these "brands" when anyone says social media.
The quality of a place goes hand in hand with community and dedication of moderation. HN's moderation is mostly invisible and there's a well evolved structure. This is only half of the picture. We as the community support this structure, because we like it too.
Humans are humans and language has many nuances to be automatically moderated by AI/ML. The only useful help we can get from AI/ML can be flagging some stuff for taking a look. Last decision shall be done by humans at the end of the day.
However, at the end of the day, quality of a community is part moderation and part community. Everything else is a byproduct of that.
> HN mostly reminds me of the Usenet of the late 1980s - which was in a way the social media of its time.
In terms of signal-to-noise ratio and the content focus, you're right. HN is the closest thing to the 80s Usenet community that I've found on the Internet of the current day.
However, Usenet was never social media. You didn't connect with people like you do on social media and 'follow' them. On Usenet you joined discussion fora, which sometimes included the same people across multiple fora, so you would get a sense of the poster and their calibre and quality.
I haven't been on Usenet in the 80's (coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain, my own IT history basically starts in the 90's, first internet access around 1995-98).
Did Usenet not require any moderation? Or was it simply the barrier for entry that made people behave like the access was a scarce resource? Or what do You think made the period so unique?
> Did Usenet not require any moderation? Or was it simply the barrier for entry that made people behave like the access was a scarce resource? Or what do You think made the period so unique?
Usenet didn't (in general, IIRC) have centralised moderation. Usenet had the famous killfiles, which you maintained and which elided the posts of people you found to be a nuisance.
There also were specific moderated usenet groups.
People were behaving more I think people at the time were socialized to being polite and civil and for access to usenet you had to specifically configure your usenet client (I used netscape navigator back then), so that was a barrier for entry.
You know what's better than a break? A FOREVER break!
So glad I got off Facebook so many years ago. Other social media sites can for sure be addictive or have negative outcomes but Facebook just always seemed to be the most toxic.
I stopped reading twitter and the boredom is only helping me find more interesting things to read (Kindle mainly)
But I miss being snarky with a small circuit of online acquaintances. It was ego fulfilling, dropping one liners on almost-famous people (in context) and getting some degree of recognition.
I'm getting some flak from family glued on, who want to know "where I went" but thats survivable.
On the whole, agree with the premise. Its trash. USENET pre great-re-org was slow trash, ML are trashy only in very minor ways. Fast trash is worserer.
HN is not that bad. I think it goes to moderation (Good job Dan!) which is done carefully. A blog I like has the byline "my blog my rules" and you know, for anything short of speakers corner I think this is fine: its not the commons.
I quit social media entirely many years ago: it felt like quitting smoking, just less difficult but the same level of benefits.
I also shifted how I get news: I don't read or watch "event-oriented" journalism (aka, reporting) and shifted entirely to analysis (through radio and press). The biggest win is that the timeframe is different, as analysis requires perspective, opposite to reporting which only focuses on the now.
I feel like I have a better, deeper, understanding of the world now, and with a slower pace, allowing a quieter perspective (which does not prevent from objective worry wrt current events).
I don’t think it is because I can’t follow people (can I??). At least my use of it is only hitting the homepage and the occasional search. More similar to a newspaper with better comments. I agree that HN is social as in community but “social media” has a very tainted definition in my mind that mostly involves following a predefined set of people, creating all kinds of positive and negative side effects. HN belongs more to forums in my mind. I wouldn’t consider forums or IRC social media, at the same time I understand other persons might see it differently.
Old school forums were still social media, they just hadn’t been labeled as such yet.
Some of my most toxic moments as a teenager/young adult occurred on forums. I had to leave them entirely. Praise the lord I left them when I did because some of my old friends said some rather stupid stuff on forums and are paying for it now.
FWIW, I'm not objecting HN or forums are not social media.
Rather that nowadays, social media have more mechanics that are typical:
* presence of brands
* influencers
* algorithmic bubble filters
* attention hoarding
Of course, forums and HN are social media and can be toxic as well.
I may he wrong and I'm happy to read more, but I hope I clarified where I draw the line with what (I think) is typical and expected of social media, from a business/industry perspective.
old school forums were the single greatest thing that human kind has ever invented, including all medicine that has ever been invented. In fact, we should all be using old school forums.
This is genius (although I do wonder how you get your war news, then. Do you not follow the Russia war at all? Would it change if you had relevates there? Would it change if the war came to your backyard? Say another 9/11? War reporting is essential, but it would break your rule of not following live reporting.
Junk food's a great analogy. When encountering delicious junk food we're biologically compulsed to gorge. And just like we learn to moderate our junk food intake, it's easy enough to learn the warning signs of doom scrolling and put an end to it (just takes awareness and discipline).
Side note: I do the same when I (through force of habit) start a game of bullet chess, there's about 5 seconds before the game starts - just enough time to quickly cancel! (if I play 1 bullet chess game, I'll probably play 5 more right after, so quickly escaping when I shouldn't be playing is a huge benefit).
Hot take: I read what other people sre doing on HN and I feel like I'm an utterly mediocre dev who's just pushing features at work to make someone rich, and I can't do much about it because I have a family relying on my income.
I don't necessarily think that is such a hot take, but a feeling shared by many of us. And I think that this ties to the title of the post and general discussion - many people (myself included) feel bad when seeing other people achieve something great or extraordinary.
It's so easy to diminish ones achievements, I often do it as well, sometimes without giving it too much thought.
But I think its also easy to forget that people in social media (or in HN posts) usually just present the best parts of them. Nobody talks about his/hers bad sides or vices, so it's easy to think that all the other people are great and better than us.
In reality most people - like you and me - are probably in the 80-90% of normal workers, be it IT or not, that achieve some successes in life and have some screw-ups as well. What we see in social media is a highly curate 5% of people that shine the spotlight on something great they did.
I definitely feel this one. I often feel completely worthless as a developer when I read sites like HN. I can barely grasp a lot of the cool stuff people are doing.
It makes me feel like I don't belong in the industry and seriously depresses me. It makes me think I really am an imposter.
Why do I keep coming back if that's what it does to me? I don't know.
On that latter point though, go look at a US metro region specific tax calculator for those salaries, then subtract an extra $200 a month (or $500 for families) for health insurance premiums, and look at average rent in those areas too. The differential is still there, but less than you probably thought.
Until the past couple weeks I haven't used reddit in years because its just a bunch of toxic echo chambers. Today I tried posting a helpful suggestion to someone asking for recommendations for speakers for their parents' TV. Several other users got nasty and a mod deleted our thread because I dared to suggest a soundbar in the "home theater" forum. I guess I'll try again in a few more years?
Reddit is best when the sub-reddits are smallish. Home Theater is gets pretty rabid when it comes to soundbars, that's the last place to ask or give soundbar advice.
Typically, the subreddits I like the best are splinters from the original. Typically these start after some sub-reddit drama happens and a moderate size group decides to go somewhere else.
The only time social media makes me happier and less anxious is when I'm creating, not consuming. I've consumed digital media and social media for majority of my life as I grew up as 56k(dial-up) & cable became mainstream as I approached teens.
It makes me sad to reflect upon my life mostly being a comparison to different images online of how others live their often "fictional" lives and how mimetic desire had me wanting what they have although it didn't actually make me "happier" when I did in fact obtain those things in life.
I think this problem is a very personal one. I think everyone has a love/hate relationship with social media and only you know how to find the balance that is "just right" for you. While I am grateful for my generation to have not had such an attachment to technology and devices (i'm only 30), I do hope that the newer generations can find peace with the similar challenges of being addicted to digital media/social media/the internet from an early age into adulthood.
I must comment about the people claiming it does nothing to them.
I thought so, too. I justified spending more time on these sites.
However - as the time went by, I noticed these posts moving into my subconscious mind. Thoughts I had afterwards were a little skewed.
If you enter a forest and you hear a sound you have never heard before, you look around and find the source. In 3 years, if you hear that sound again, your body remembers and you may not look around again.
That is the power of our memory and I really want to emphasize there is way more going on than you can keep track of at first glance.
I think it depends on how and why you use social media. For me, having picked Twitter back up recently after having been mostly dormant for the past 4 years or so, it is about inspiration.
The next thing for me is to create a startup. I am immersing myself back in to the heartbeat / pulse of what's going on and thinking about how my ideas intersect with this.
There are a lot of inspiring projects I am following lately, specifically around devtools, platforms, etc. that almost exclusively exist on these mediums.
If twitter works for you then that's great, but if[0] you're purely seeking inspiration for creating a startup, you could consider listening to podcasts like Indie Hackers instead. It's probably way less of an attention black hole, but still inspirational.
[0] I can't tell from your comment if that's the sole purpose. If not: never mind.
Appreciate the podcast suggestion. It's more about immersion than it is one specific thing. In addition to the social media angle, I am hopeful tech meetups come back in earnest in San Francisco at different startups; this is the melting pot of ideas and innovation and they're so much fun.
Whilst I've taken breaks, indeed quit social media years ago it does somewhat pain me that many services needed are accesable via such platforms and you can send a tweet to the local council all public and they will respond. Send an email - maybe, eventualy, though often not as gets bounced about and phone calls, well they embraced work from home as given my local council opertunity to sell the crown jewls (aka historic building they base out of). So it sadly does seem somewhat a neccesary evil.
FOr me social media needs the ability to censor and filter placed into the hands of the user and let them decide what offends them or not and give them to tools to filter that for their own comfort. Sadly that is kinda lacking and you get the social media's flavout of censoring, which can be biased to the stage of fueling issues.
One question though - has anybody ever taken a break from Hacker News due to content? Me - nope, and doubt many if any who have been that way due to content/engagements. The level of docurum and interactions upon this social media format does attract and enforce a more civil and factual level of discourse that trancends anything your twitters or facebooks etc offer.
So thank you once again Dang for keeping things real.
I took a break from social media for a year; it was excellent. Briefly after my return, I found out an extended family member passed away. Nobody would have told me otherwise. People will assume you're on there and in-the-loop even if you aren't. It's hard to navigate any social environment where that's an implicit given of others.
I have a similar story, but for me it is 4 years and still going. I am generally calmer and my emotional amplitude is less pronounced during the day than when I was on SM, but getting involved socially means you really have to be proactive, otherwise you sort of disappear
I only used traditional social media for a brief moment around 16 years ago. What works nicely for me is I have noted down the birthdays of everyone I care about with org-mode. I always try to contact them, and also send messages on christmas.
Taking a break from things such as social media makes perfect sense since we all need to be encouraged from time to time to stay more connected to our immediate surroundings (including ourselves). However, I do think that the real work comes to find a sustainable balance between anything that could distract us and our values. Overtime, these distractions will become even more prominent and we'd better get used to manage these constantly. To learn say "no" more often, and to be more aware when too much time on certain tools is enough. It's a process and takes time!
I’ve been off of social media for about two years, and I haven’t looked back. But, I’ve realized that it’s been harder to stay in touch with people.
I think the answer is that personal newsletters will make a comeback. Even digital minimalists like Cal Newport have one! Without viral dynamics or an algorithmic feed, a good email seems to be the calmest way to stay in touch.
I’ve played around with tools like Substack, Revue, and Convertkit for maintaining a personal newsletter - but none of them fulfilled my needs. Blogs are so permanent - newsletters should be light and easy, and not loaded with growth hacker tools.
So, my project is Postcard - a personal newsletter software designed to replace social media: https://postcard.page
It’s still in the early days - but I’ll trade free lifetime access for feedback - just email me.
> But, I’ve realized that it’s been harder to stay in touch with people.
The people I was in contact with before social media are still in contact with me via phone, text, chat, email, etc. Most of my social media "friends" were connections and acquaintances. I was never really in contact with those people so nothing was lost when I deleted my social media accounts.
If they don't make an effort to talk to you then they aren't that interested in a relation/friendship and not worth worrying about.
Being off almost 10 years, life got significantly better and more interesting. Also stop using smart phone, or only use smart phone in airplane mode most of time. That also helped alot!
I’ve noticed the same thing about the news. When I don’t follow the news I am happier and less anxious. Yet, it doesn’t feel right to be ignorant of what is going on in the world. How does one balance their own happiness versus being informed? “Ignorance is bliss” is a saying for a reason I suppose.
Same thing here. I’ve ended up with two places I exclusively check for news: AllSides [0] and a satirical news source of my choice.
AllSides helps me frame big events from multiple perspectives. I’ve always had a hard time seeing these perspectives, so having someone else do it for me helps.
The satirical site introduces me to assorted current events with a bit of lightheartedness. If it seems important enough, I’ll do a quick search to learn what the “real” news is.
With this setup, I am not as well-versed in all current events. However, it’s much less draining, and it also takes less time out of my day!
I suffer from this conundrum too. One thing I did observe is that people who don't actively follow the 24/7 news and social media cycle are still are fairly aware of important major events (Ukraine, COVID, etc), as it would be hard to be completely ignorant without living under a rock, so maybe it doesn't have to be a binary thing.
I visit small Reddit subreddit which is really well-moderated, good sources, I really like it. In spite of, cannot be compared with casual Facebook group.
For example, I've created some fancy FB group when people can join and after I logged in after a month, it had almost 1 000 submissions waiting for approval. So i set this to auto submissions. I came back and was horrified with the content.
Images of naked people which were breaking so many rules and had so many views before Facebook deleted it. What's the worse, I had to see it because of admin privilege. Thanks Mark. Fake accounts posting IBAN codes, sharing ads and other things. At the end, my group was penalized (not banned). Like, the biggest gigantic superb tech company can't even detect a nude stuff from fake accounts?
It's been about 5 years since I made the decision to quit Twitter/Facebook.
The only social media I've got to endure is LinkedIn (which is becoming more like FB by the day but that's a separate discussion). This is purely because my target market live on there, so I have no choice but to be on there but as soon as I am able I'll disconnect from that too. I cannot wait for that day.
Social media platforms are of course optimised by their owners for their owners. They could not care less about your feelings, so long as you keep coming back.
I think 90% of all that is wrong with the world can be, at least in some part, traced back to social media.
My view is that they have been devastating for the mental health of society - and the more people who realise that social media is bad for them the better.
Indeed, I do think LinkedIn is the new FB. Replace FB's "happy vacation photos" with "raised $100M seed investment" and you have LinkedIn. I am constantly surprised how much time people spend posting and liking stuff on LinkedIn, makes me wonder how they get any work done.
Deleted Facebook 2 years ago, Instagram 1 year ago.
The only social media account I have today is on Twitter and I am thinking about deleting that one.
It is true that you can feel a bit isolated from everyone, but it pushes you to go out with people and ask them what have they been up to, send them a message etc. I find the time spent on that much more valuable than the time spent on social media. While it is true that you can get up to what people are doing, I found that I spend the least amount of time getting up to date" with people I know and much more just scrolling through and "exploring" on all of these social media sites.
If you feel similar, I highly recommend you to delete any of the social media apps.
The studies focusing on social media are a bit dummy. I'm doing a PhD on the topic and I too feel like a dummy. Everyone has a different definition of social media, but we can't really generalize findings on all platforms. The studies should focus on services with their names, but then they would be less interesting. Are Twitter and Facebook the same? Can we generalize findings on one to another? No we can't. Besides, is HN a social media platform? Or Reddit? Talking about social media does not make much sense. It also hides out the fact that in the end everything is about the internet and digital content, together forming the new mass medium which is taking the world by storm.
Being able to take a break from social media is one of the nobler goals we started building Murmel (https://murmel.social) with. It’s not an easy process, and we are far from finished, but our customers have already reported positive results back to us. Rather than scrolling on Twitter for hours, they now let the best of their Twitter timeline arrive in their inboxes once a day. Like the morning newspaper reading routine, I am hoping that we would be able to provide people with the option to disengage from the downward spiral of doom-scrolling, and instead, get the gist of all there is to know in one daily email digest.
Cal Newport's time-block planner saved my career. At the beginning of the pandemic I was struggling to focus at work, like many others. His time-block planner got me back into action and feeling more productive.
I love the quick "Shutdown" routine at the end of each day, so I can easily switch back to life outside of work without dragging work thoughts with me.
I took 1+ month break from Facebook and after I got back to check some groups, I totally forget to visit this social site so often. Like at the end of day, I remind myself that I wasn't there and still not missing anything. I was tired of bad news and angry comments.
There must be really some dopamine effect about these things. Like person is bored so you scroll 100 posts which fulfils your desire and after some time when your levels drop, you come back making this something like habit. Similar to drinking coffee, a lot of people complain about headache if they don't drink right amount of coffee they are used to every day.
I ran into this with a person of romantic interest. Thankfully I never got addicted to social media; once I could see that a "break from social media" would be the only thing that could possibly help this person.
It never worked out between us, however I was exposed to rather relevant info on the topic.
For anyone looking for tips and tricks to cope: r/nosurf [1]. Lot of garbage there but I found it interesting to see how many people have problems with this and how they found their epiphanies around it
I still remember when social media/web 2.0 was kicking off. All my mates were on it. I tried I really did but I thought the whole thing was a waste of time. When I finally learned the true intent behind these platforms wasn't connecting people but was making money from those people (connecting people is just the hook) I was done.
Having seen how these platforms affect my children I'm now dead set against them.
You literally are the product, and are manipulated to stay on the platforms to continue to be so.
This is my long way of saying, with personal annocdotes, that I am not surprised at all by this finding.
Facebook's primary aim is to get you to stay so keeping your attention is key to getting you to look at more ads. You feel depressed by looking at other people's Facebook webpages which look positive and happy so you compare it to you own sad, miserable life. Reality is folk mostly post positive reinforcing stories, not the crap in their lives that you'd miss otherwise. The best way to deal with social media is to stop using it completely. Life is too short to waste your precious minutes on this planet using Facebook.
For me I found this made me check them more, as I would be thinking "well maybe someone has sent me a message since I last checked" and it might be true. It's a tricky one! I found uninstalling the apps and logging out on the web after each session helps a bit, as then there is some friction in having to check what's going on since I have to log in every time.
My trick is to follow accounts about things that I enjoy and people who are positive.
I simply unfollow accounts if they post toxic or exhausting things. Even if I know them in person (including my sibling, sorry send a text or a postcard!)
Now my feed is full of positive things, close friends, my favorite hobbies and jokes that I enjoy.
Also, only using insta and tiktok is an immediate improvement. Facebook is a cesspool due to it constantly highlighting "friends" comments on random other accounts.
I did the same for Twitter. I turned off notifications. And I check it only when I feel like it. Read up on some things. Comment. And then go away. It’s been amazing.
I read more. I have much more time to spend doing other more social things in meat space. It’s been amazing to just turn off and the notification thing was the key: turning them off allowed me to control when I used the app and not the other way around (because a red notification counter triggers me to check it out etc.).
I took a permanent break from social media and am much happier about it. These days, I only keep a slim business-oriented presence on some social media networks.
For the communities that I want to engage in that have moved over to social media, I use anonymized burner accounts that are in no way associated with who I actually am, and I don't follow or interact with people I actually know in real life. I like it this way.
Interesting. The latter reminds me of a book ("Drop Dead Healthy"), where the author tests a similar technique to incentivize productive behavior. There it goes a step further, though: If you miss a deadline, break a promise, etc., you must donate a specific amount to a cause that you despise.
I'm building SocialsDetox ( https://socialsdetox.com/r/sdh ) along similar lines, to provide an easy way to block/timeout from Social Media (and/or other categories that may be detrimental to well-being). Unfortunately I suspect not many people would opt for the "donation to a cause they despised" feature (before being allowed to re-enable their access); will look at adding it as an option and report on the take-up.
Is a week long enough to experience such changes? Probably for a change in perceived well-being, but for a change in depression or anxiety it seems too short. Anti-depressants and therapy work on a timescale of months. I don’t know, maybe social media has a profoundly negative effect on mental health and its removal for even a week can cause immediate benefit.
I wanted to get off social media for a long time (Facebook, mostly) but couldn't bring myself to close my account.
A few weeks ago I just uninstalled the app. I don't have any FOMO since I can always check on the computer,but I end up doing it less and less often. I think the behavioral hold they have on me is loosening, and it feels awesome.
> Why do we insist on still shrugging our shoulders and continuing to treat the use of these tools like some sort of unavoidable civic and professional necessity?
I am positively charmed by that “we” above. Time and time again people are telling me their theories about how our world works - and these theories imply that I do not exist. Charming, no?
I am wondering why they did not break out social media by types. As there are social media sites not driven by the ad-eyes metrics that seem to be better at more reasonable discussion but not always. Examples would be this site itself versus 4chan. Both are not ad driven, but 4chan seem to be toxic compared to this one.
I think if I had a phone that (apart from calls and texts) did Email, Whatsapp, an e-reader and a music/podcast player I think I would be interested. Maybe a browser because some emails have links you need to action, but I realise using a browser opens you up to all the time-sinks you are trying to avoid.
In topics like these on HN, people often compare social media (SM) with tobacco/drugs. I still disagree with this comparison.
For one, social media is not inherently bad like smoking/some drugs.
The only SM I use currently is Instagram. I spend 30 minutes or less per day and I’m usually happy at the end.
In fact I would argue IG made me a better person — I got into fitness, helped me connect with a football club I now play with, etc. In the past I used Facebook a lot and it changed my life — I found jobs and built connection with people I would have never had the opportunity to meet.
The majority of my friends have a similar experience. My father (60) who lives in a remote part of the world uses “joy” to express his experience with SM.
Secondly, on the topic of social media making people feel insecure about something (like their bodies). Isn’t that everywhere? At the beach? In magazines? On TV? At parties? In school?
I’m into fitness and I see people that have better aesthetics than me on SM and IRL. I appreciate their beauty but it doesn’t faze me. Isn’t it common knowledge that someone always have more X than you? And these people are usually the minority?
Lastly, influencers react to the market. Anyone who has ever posted content know that wholesome content are usually not engaged on as much as exaggerated/superficial content. If people want less of these, maybe they should vote with their likes & follows?
PS: I do realize some part of my comment might not be as practical as simply not using social media at all. But I think we should be teaching people these skills as it applies beyond SM usage.
These sorts of responses always come up to these kinds of posts and, with respect, they always seem to come down to: "I don't have any issues with social media so I can't see why anyone else does"
But imagine saying to an alcoholic: "I can have a few beers on a Friday night and then stop, and so can the majority of my friends, so I dont see what the problem is."
Again, I think this analogy doesn’t work. Firstly, alcohol is inherently bad for you. SM is not. SM to me is more malleable and we can choose to make it what we want. We could apply this to most things from video games to work.
Video games or work do not expose you to ads or recommendation systems, or feeds of your friends living a perfect life.
There are no parallels among these, I think you’re trying a bit too hard to go against the current. Its good for you that you have a healthy relationship with social media, but as evidenced by the study in this post and others it does have a negative impact that you can’t wish away.
> Secondly, on the topic of social media making people feel insecure about something (like their bodies). Isn’t that everywhere? At the beach? In magazines? On TV? At parties? In school?
The thought that I have overcome about this is that SM is different from the examples that you gave. In magazines or TV, you assume that is going to be filled with "non-real" people (esthetic surgeries...), but at the end of the day, you will be surrounded by people like you.
At parties, school, or at the beach, yes you can find some perfect people, but the vast majority are going to be just normal people like you.
SM is different for that, you are comparing every nuance of you with an adulterated version of normal people (just people like you, not famous people). Personally, SM makes me feel that everybody except me has an ideal life and I know that's not true.
I don't like the "social" aspect of social media, I like the "media" part though. I like to follow photographers, use to follow some type of hobby, but not to see people's life.
That makes sense. Do you see the general public making a similar shift that most people on SM besides some of my friends are “not real” people?
I slightly disagree with the parties, school part. Most people with “great bodies” are most likely the ones with revealing clothes at these places. There are lots of “not real” people there (they are not at a celebrity level but they make sure they are visible). Maybe your experience differs?
> I like the "media" part though. I like to follow photographers, use to follow some type of hobby, but not to see people's life.
> SM makes me feel that everybody except me has an ideal life and I know that's not true.
I’m split between both. I follow some people for the media part; And others for their wholesome content which usually includes part of their lives.
The sad part is that these wholesome people sometimes turn into “not real” people.
When I started a fitness account, I quickly realized the engagement from people were taking me into being a fake person. Thankfully, I closed that a while ago. But my takeaway from this experience, is that the problem is with people and not SM? (But what do I know :) )
Long ago I deleted my Facebook and Reddit, I have an Instagram account with just a few close people and barely use it, I recently switched to using Twitter in "reply-only mode" (i.e. I don't post anything other than a reply to something someone posted and, in general, that's work-related only).
Are we meant to be happy through ignorance? I'd rather be anxious and motivated to improve my life by fixing the issues that upset me, even in a "hyper-competitive" environment like social media... There's nothing wrong with trying to get a Lamborghini because some celebrity is showing off his.
Social media doesn't affect my mental health. I use social media (e.g. Twitter) to get information on what my peers and the people whose work am interested in are doing. They don't post a lot, but when they do it's worth reading nearly always. I visit it 2 or 3 times a week
Good that it doesn't in moderation. But what you're implying is anecdata, and better phrased that you do not have evidence if social media affects your health - since you don't use it as often. Bit pedantic, but important to state as not being counterpoint to the article presented in context :)
I can agree that social media makes things worse for me... Reading stupid arguments by malicious people just makes me angry... And the time wasted could probably be used on somewhat better things, like reading books, playing games, watching some movies or tv shows...
I'd be interested to hear whether other HN users consider this site social media. My mental model of HN is that it's basically a longform version of Twitter with a more interesting/intelligent and (slightly) less shrill user community.
I was an social media early adopter but have been off from big social medias for years and as a non-native english speaker i can't find correct words to describe how happy I have been with this decision. Maybe someone else can handle it better.
Totally agree with this! I've used all kind of social media in the past, but I have been living freely since I stopped using these (well, I still go on to twitter once or twice a week, but I can still see a big difference!)
I run a local resolver on my home network and I block most social media for 23~ hours of the day. Definitely also helps with productivity. See yourself abusing time on a site? blackhole it via dns.
The only case of social networks for me - all kinds of meetings / gathering. I miss the time when all organization campaign was on some traditional forums, I just do not find FB usable.
Yes, I only visit reddit when I have only have something curious about, I don't actively scroll through it, maybe a few minutes when I'm on it. That's healthy boundary.
As for Hacker News, there is https://hackernewsletter.com/ that sends you mail of the best articles on startups, technology, programming, and more. All links are curated by hand from Hacker News. Join 60,000+ other subscribers and don't miss another week.
They also offer daily mails, but I'd say avoid it.
Easy way to discern if site is social Cookie Clicker:
1.Does it provide a rating/score for content.
2.Does it reward users with larger rating/score?
3.Does it limit users with lower rating/score?
If all three question are positive, then it is
optimizing for content-score engagement type
of users, pushing the lever for extra dopamine hits.
I'm 39, this is for reference (in case anyone reads this).
I got into programming because I was a gamer (year is 1998) and I built my clan's website (they're called teams today) by copying this other cool dude from another clan. He was my mentor. It took me so long to do what he did, what he told me was - "if you want to get it done, disconnect". We used modems so disconnecting was normal and easy - if you unplug the telephone wire, it's a hassle to get behind the PC, plug the wire, go through the whole buzzing etc, gist being that even if you want to "just check what's new on forum" - you give up due to hassle.
This "technique" stuck with me. Want to get it done? Disconnect. And then came the era of Facebook and other sites where people shared their pictures, opinion, thoughts etc. as if anyone cares about their everyday lives. I'm from the generation where you never shared anything with strangers online.
And then, it turns out, people get hooked to this whole infinite scrolling business, being occupied with content they don't care about. They can't disconnect. And when you don't disconnect, you're distracted.
I tried Facebook. I hate it with passion. I don't want to write about myself. I'm not interesting to myself, let alone others. I like privacy. I don't care what my Facebook friend does, why don't they do it without having to archive it? There's many things that are way, way too odd to me when it comes to social media but I understand it's like a multiplayer game to a teenager - it's something new and there's a lot to explore, heck you even connect with certain people on a certain level.
I've never seen a social media user who was not impacted by negative content. For some reason, human turns to negatives before they do to positives. And that's what global social media is - the outlet where a lot of people let out their negatives. That's what makes me unhappy. To read about flat earth, then getting tangled in endless explanations on why it is/isn't flat. It's the people who are stubborn, unreceptive, just waiting to share without trying to receive.
Not everyone had mentors or difficulties in connecting to the internet which gives them the means to moderate the usage of it. Being exposed to a huge amount of information is dangerous, I've seen people become sloppy because they need to read / consume fast so they can move to the next thing which MIGHT be more interesting but they don't know until they try to read/consume it and the cycle continues.
So yes, I wholeheartedly agree without any facts and based purely on my subjective impression of social media - that it's something that makes me unhappy. It does not mean it should or does make someone else unhappy, but I for sure liked the internet when it was more difficult for an average human to use it.
What I think is, it's the comparison and less focus span, that leads us anxious. Though social media has a role to play in this. We also have to accept the fact that it has become a part of our lives, so understanding the core of problems we face would work in long run.
First, you notice a friend's post stating that she has accepted her ideal job.
Then you read a coworker's too political rant.
You continue browsing and see a video of your neighbour enjoying a fantastic tropical vacation.
And now your cousin has uploaded a before and after photo that makes you want to hide your thighs for the rest of your life.
The next thing you know, you're second-guessing your profession, irritated by politics, wondering why you can't afford a trip, and researching your next diet.
Social media is nothing but roller coaster,