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With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

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Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#351

Post by str33t_punk »

duskwuff wrote: post #346
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I specifically cut out Reddit entirely. Subreddits quickly end up being insular groupthink echo chambers, thanks to the voting system and biased moderators. The noise:content ratio is simply skewed way towards pointless noise. It's not worth it.

I've found that Reddit improves dramatically as you move away from the huge default subreddits and into smaller, more focused subs -- for hobbies you're involved in, for instance. For that sort of thing it's not half bad.

Until you realize ALL subreddits are almost entirely gamed by marketers.

Why do you think the reddit hive mind in small hobby subreddits conglomerates on a few devices / items?

Reddit is literally the most shilled platform. Easy botting + the up vote down vote system

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#352

Post by brucephillips »

str33t_punk wrote: post #351
duskwuff wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that Reddit improves dramatically as you move away from the huge default subreddits and into smaller, more focused subs -- for hobbies you're involved in, for instance. For that sort of thing it's not half bad.

Until you realize ALL subreddits are almost entirely gamed by marketers. Why do you think the reddit hive mind in small hobby subreddits conglomerates on a few devices / items? Reddit is literally the most shilled platform. Easy botting + the up vote down vote system

Do you have an example? I don't observe any bias in /r/vaporents, for instance.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#353

Post by bonesss »

lsc wrote: post #331
jraby3 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not on social media aside from Reddit. But what I notice with my wife and others is a simple reason why I dislike it. If you have 400 friends, and they each only take one vacation a year, that means 8x per week, you're looking at other people taking a vacation. Even if you travel 4x per year, you'll still feel like you never do anything and everyone else is always celebrating their life. I realize this is a simpl…

>Also, even having a handful of very wealthy friends can eventually lead to feelings of envy. I.. huh. I really don't get this. Maybe it is because I am doing better than I thought I was going to for the first half of my life? or maybe I'm just less jealous than most people? but yeah, there are a few people I follow who you could say I am envious of; people who are super successful in all the ways I want to be succes…

> I guess I don't see how seeing people who are more successful than you on facebook could possibly be more distressing than seeing those people at work

I think you're hoping over a few categorical issues that create the social media dysthymia. It's not about seeing people who are more successful. It's not about "better" or "worse". It's about social regulation in formative egos.

From your posts you are coming off like an aspergersy male adult engineer -- I'm one of those myself, so I mean that with love -- dealing in concrete world value from the perspective of a fully formed ego not used to internalizing the external. Equating the discontent with rational motives jealousy or envy or desire, instead of judgement and personal failings implicit in habitual social comparison.

Fundamentally social media habits can create two major areas of discontent: comparing your behind-the-scenes life with other peoples highlights reels, and the comparability of the elevated personalities. To take your "boss" example: that's generally not someone I identify with deeply because my daddy wasn't as rich, and I didn't inherit the company, and blah blah blah. To our primate brains `bosses` tend to be `others` and not `us`. If that boss were your childhood buddy, OTOH, you'd have a different take on things... And that different take, and the implied reflection of being less than or worse than, that you would have with a familiar person having that role is what social media does with vacation pics and such. You're not seeing someone in another group, like someone famous, doing something fun. You're seeing someone in your group doing it, causing an implicit comparison. And this comparison is based on purpose-selected content made to project a happy image, is non-stop, asymmetrical, and always worst when you're at your lowest.

These contexts and framings are fundamental to how marketing works on us, and are a shared facet of human representation of the world around them. What you're not getting here is what a 15 yo will feel like after 3 hours a day of staring at a crappy feed that you, and most people on HN, would find deadly boring. We're also old enough and self respecting enough to avoid that crap when/if it starts to hurt. I bet HN readers are highly active online and suspiciously inactive on social media...

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#354

Post by lsc »

joejerryronnie wrote: post #347
lsc wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, even having a handful of very wealthy friends can eventually lead to feelings of envy. I.. huh. I really don't get this. Maybe it is because I am doing better than I thought I was going to for the first half of my life? or maybe I'm just less jealous than most people? but yeah, there are a few people I follow who you could say I am envious of; people who are super successful in all the ways I want to be succes…

Perhaps there's a difference if you meet someone who is already successful or who's past accomplishments you admire versus that idiot in high school who barely passed chemistry by cheating off your answers, exibited the worst of the sexist jock/bro mentality, skated by on his good looks and is now driving a lambo and married to a supermodel.

I'm still not seeing how that is any more distressing than seeing, say, your boss' boss, who once took obvious relish in firing one of your friends, continue to be successful in the office every day, you know?

You are going to encounter your financial superiors at work quite often, in ways that are a lot more directly impactful and a lot harder to ignore than pictures on facebook, and this is not new.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#355

Post by jboynyc »

lsc wrote: post #67

Tuesday, this was the theme at my toastmaster's debate club[1] - I got stuck arguing that social media doesn't make you depressed. And... my problem with my argument wasn't that it was untrue, but that it was kinda mean. I don't feel jealous of the lives of almost anyone I went to high school with; quite the opposite. A lot of them post "racist memes with spelling mistakes" - which is sad on many levels; If nothing e…

As others have pointed out in responding to you, you don't only have to be following the super-rich and super-successful for your feeds to project an image skewed toward their experiences.

Thanks to the heavy-tailed distribution of most aspirational resources (whether that is followers/friends, likes/retweets or various offline resources), we encounter a "generalized friendship paradox" (see https://doi.org/10.15195/v1.a10 among others) where on average our friends in our social networks score more highly on a variety of attributes than we do.

So it's enough for us to follow a few individuals on the long tail of a distribution for the paradox to apply that, even though most of our friends might not be particularly impressive individuals when compared to ourselves, on average our friends are much more popular, successful and beautiful than we are. Thanks to the structure of our networks (and online networks might have greater skew than offline networks), socially-induced anxiety can come about quite quickly. Not a lot of curation is needed.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#356

Post by lsc »

madaxe_again wrote: post #321
lsc wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's a western thing. In the east being smart is cool. I thought it was an exclusive school thing. The Americans I know who went to exclusive high schools seem to have had very different experiences. I even know several people (who went to a 'special' highschool for 'gifted' children) who claimed that they enjoyed high school more than college.

Nope. I was educated mostly at public (private) school in the UK, and spent a year at a private school in the US. I was ruthlessly mocked until I learned to dissemble, to not put my hand up to answer a question, to be publicly told off by teachers for not handing in work. The reason is simple - if you make others feel inferior, by being better at anything in any way than them, they hate and envy you.

>The reason is simple - if you make others feel inferior, by being better at anything in any way than them, they hate and envy you.

If that were true, the sports stars would not have been popular

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#357

Post by lsc »

manmal wrote: post #345
lsc wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, even having a handful of very wealthy friends can eventually lead to feelings of envy. I.. huh. I really don't get this. Maybe it is because I am doing better than I thought I was going to for the first half of my life? or maybe I'm just less jealous than most people? but yeah, there are a few people I follow who you could say I am envious of; people who are super successful in all the ways I want to be succes…

If you are perfectly content with your life, then Facebook probably won’t be an issue at all. But if you have _any_ area where you don’t feel fulfilled - like bad life/work balance, insufficient funds, loneliness, unfulfilled baby wish - then Facebook is going to rub it into your face, daily, that others have what you desire, and does it in a misleading way. Let’s say you can’t have a baby and you have a colleague wi…

>If you are perfectly content with your life, then Facebook probably won’t be an issue at all. But if you have _any_ area where you don’t feel fulfilled - like bad life/work balance, insufficient funds, loneliness, unfulfilled baby wish - then Facebook is going to rub it into your face, daily, that others have what you desire, and does it in a misleading way.

I am super amused that in the middle of a heated debate on the internet, a stranger is implying that I am a happy, well-balanced person with a full life :)

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#358

Post by [deleted] »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #253
lsc wrote: post #67

Tuesday, this was the theme at my toastmaster's debate club[1] - I got stuck arguing that social media doesn't make you depressed. And... my problem with my argument wasn't that it was untrue, but that it was kinda mean. I don't feel jealous of the lives of almost anyone I went to high school with; quite the opposite. A lot of them post "racist memes with spelling mistakes" - which is sad on many levels; If nothing e…

Not helpful, facilitating contempt for people is not the opposite of facilitating depression. It's even worse when it facilitates contempt for your peer group, e.g. dumb yuppie millennial shit prejudicing interactions with the neighbors, coworkers, people that have tech jobs and live near you etc.

[deleted]

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#359

Post by seszett »

str33t_punk wrote: post #351
duskwuff wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that Reddit improves dramatically as you move away from the huge default subreddits and into smaller, more focused subs -- for hobbies you're involved in, for instance. For that sort of thing it's not half bad.

Until you realize ALL subreddits are almost entirely gamed by marketers. Why do you think the reddit hive mind in small hobby subreddits conglomerates on a few devices / items? Reddit is literally the most shilled platform. Easy botting + the up vote down vote system

I'm pretty sure you're wrong with your ALL.

Some of the country subreddits I know, /r/France or /r/Belgium, or misc. interests like /r/gardening /r/dwarffortress are definitely not "gamed by marketers". For those that are about topics that are more easy prey to advertising, competent moderation usually works fine.

It's really not that difficult to find interesting and genuine subreddits.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#360

Post by watwut »

abusoufiyan wrote: post #341
throwaway2801 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having discovered atheism at such a tender age , they are left hopeless and desolate . (emphasis mine) What?? As if atheists were monsters. As an atheist (more agnostic actually - I cannot be sure no gods exist), your answer feels interesting but also surprising, very saddening and actually chocking. Let's not make atheists look like evil people who make children depressed. This is not OK. I never needed to have an…

>Let's not make atheists look like evil people who make children depressed. This is not OK. That's not what he's doing at all. But it is also true that religion is largely the underpinning of morality for most people in the world and early exposure to the idea that morality is relative and malleable and that actually the only real motivator is self-preservation is probably unhealthy for adolescents. >Solving my probl…

> the idea that you aren't just doing things for yourself or solving your own problems but solving the problems of others because they are your equals

Equality really really does not describe views of hardcore christians I personally know nor the content of sermons I personally heard not christian journals articles I read.

Nor does tolerance, no matter how you define tolerance.

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