Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some might argue a form of figurative brain cancer.
What does that even mean, in concrete terms? How does it affect my health, and what causal evidence is there to support that link?
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Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco
81–90 of 100 posts
Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco
#82First, you need to look at human attention as a commodity just like gold - available in fixed quantity and everyone wants piece of it. It turns out that FB managed to conquer large portion of human attention after it emerged. This also meant massive attention transfer from news media to FB. However until year ago, FB benevolently gave back significant pie of its attention share to news media by heavily promoting thei…
Nit: the avg person in the US spends 27 minutes per day on Facebook. This is small compared to TV/Netflix/YouTube, which is upwards of 4 hours per day. This is why Facebook had a huge push into video—they wanted a slice of that pie. They haven't made much headway there.
I would argue that human attention slice dedicated to entertainment is overall unchanged but transfer has been from traditional TV to online streaming. For the news domain transfer has been from news media to FB.
Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco
#83Should smart phones be treated like tobacco too? Millions (soon, billions) of people glued to their phones have hurt their relationships, impoverished their lives, and developed an addiction quite akin to the addiction to the social media. In fact, this addiction has killed thousands because someone couldn't stop messaging while driving. The phone manufacturers and app developers pay a lip service to these problems, and continue to design ever more accessible and addictive devices.
Or should we draw a line somewhere, and agree that it's unreasonable to eliminate every imaginable source of addiction from the world, and that people should be able to deal with it?
Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco
#84First, you need to look at human attention as a commodity just like gold - available in fixed quantity and everyone wants piece of it. It turns out that FB managed to conquer large portion of human attention after it emerged. This also meant massive attention transfer from news media to FB. However until year ago, FB benevolently gave back significant pie of its attention share to news media by heavily promoting thei…
Spot on analysis! "Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics." To me, facebook is this amazing place where I get to stay in touch with all my friends and family, get to plan events with them, laugh about cat gifs and live through the highs and lows of life together. So much good has happened to me through facebook...friends, jobs, love (I met my wife on FB). And the fact that every d…
Curious, do you work for Facebook?
Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
While we can't point to any direct causation right now, it also took a long time for us to have proof that smoking was harmful. In the following hypothetical scenario, think about how much blame you would be willing to assign Facebook. It may be none, but they may not be blameless: Facebook's poor privacy practices allow a malicious actor to influence the outcome of an election- they may have only swung a few thousan…
Smoking a cigarette triggers a physical addiction akin to that of heroin. It destroys free will. Social media? I dunno man if people can't look away from insta or FB long enough to watch their kids play on the floor then maybe that's their problem and not their app's. At some point we have to assign personal responsibility to ourselves and admit that the reason FB can take advantage of weak wills is because we let ou…
If these things didn't happen in the past to the same degree then something must have changed. It seems unlikely that it is human nature that has changed.
Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spot on analysis! "Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics." To me, facebook is this amazing place where I get to stay in touch with all my friends and family, get to plan events with them, laugh about cat gifs and live through the highs and lows of life together. So much good has happened to me through facebook...friends, jobs, love (I met my wife on FB). And the fact that every d…
Curious, do you work for Facebook?
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Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if people said the same thing about booze.
The differences between an addiction to alcohol and an addiction (if you can call it that) to social media are few and far between. Tbh, making a comparison between the two is heartless, careless and seriously undermines people struggling with alcohol addiction, grow up.
Could you please stop posting flame-style comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are.
If you'd check out the guidelines and take the spirit of this site more to heart (i.e. thoughtful, reflective conversation), we'd be grateful.
Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco
#88First, you need to look at human attention as a commodity just like gold - available in fixed quantity and everyone wants piece of it. It turns out that FB managed to conquer large portion of human attention after it emerged. This also meant massive attention transfer from news media to FB. However until year ago, FB benevolently gave back significant pie of its attention share to news media by heavily promoting thei…
You offer no proof, citations, anything at all to back it up. But let's assume it's true, in the end it remains a mildly interesting but utterly irrelevant analysis.
Who cares why news organisations attack Facebook as long as the criticism is correct? Facebook has done so many wicked things, the articles basically write themselves.
Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco
#89First, you need to look at human attention as a commodity just like gold - available in fixed quantity and everyone wants piece of it. It turns out that FB managed to conquer large portion of human attention after it emerged. This also meant massive attention transfer from news media to FB. However until year ago, FB benevolently gave back significant pie of its attention share to news media by heavily promoting thei…
Spot on analysis! "Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics." To me, facebook is this amazing place where I get to stay in touch with all my friends and family, get to plan events with them, laugh about cat gifs and live through the highs and lows of life together. So much good has happened to me through facebook...friends, jobs, love (I met my wife on FB). And the fact that every d…
Sure, no one's upset that you met your wife on Facebook.
We're upset about the malicious psychological experiments, spying on teens, them enabling discrimination, election manipulation and genocide, shadow profiles, etc.
You've either not been paying attention the last 10 years, or the answer to the question in the other reply must be "hell yes and proud of it".
Re: Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco
#90Look I'm a broken record at this point (if you check my history), but I feel like _someone_ has to say it. Lets treat big oil like big tobacco. Big coal. Big fast food. Big soda. These things _literally_ kill so many people every year and while Facebook is surely attributable to some deaths as a medium, it has at least some social utility. Why are there so many articles about facebook and not soda!
There are plenty of articles about sugar, soda is just a specific instance of that.
Every one focuses on topic that are important to them: global warming, poverty, etc, etc. You can focus on soda, others will focus on privacy, I see no problem with that.