Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 366 posts

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#261

Post by everdrive »

reaperducer wrote: post #148
devlopr wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are upsides. From providing self estem from a different source from the local. It has raised awareness like never before. It has provided an income for some. It allows new peer groups not available locally It provides a safer space to interact with strangers. Where we got it wrong was connecting these profiles to real life names. That has ruined people's lives.

None of the things you list are unique to social media. They all existed before the rise of the socials. Many of them existed before the internet.

This is like saying the written word existed before the printing press. It certainly did, but technology has fundamentally changed its impact.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#262

Post by mraza007 »

I hundred percent agree with this report as social is basically a modern day drug. It has played so well with our brain mechanism and made us addicted to it.

If you want to leave social especially as a teenager you have you try really hard as you fall into something called fomo(fearing of missing out)

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#263

Post by karmelapple »

jiggunjer wrote: post #234
tzs wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual counterargument I see offered to that is that sure, it is great if we can impede the spread of some completely stupid belief like flat Earth, but sometimes those things that are crazy by conventional wisdom turn out to be true. At that point, they usually mention Galileo and maybe some others, and they ask how do we avoid squashing the next Galileo with our measures to limit the spread of flat Earth theorie…

in other words: the answer is that type 1 errors self-correct quickly, but type 2 errors self-correct slowly.

Speed of acceptance may indeed be related to the type of claim, but I think it’s also highly related to the ability to confirm the evidence yourself.

There are many ways to confirm major pieces of evidence for, say, the earth being round. It’s easy enough to do, even without getting into a rocket and seeing the earth’s curvature.

There are many fewer ways to confirm a whole lot of other ideas, though, whether there’s scientific rigor behind the idea’s evidence or not.

For example, I can’t easily confirm the Higgs Boson evidence. But it also doesn’t directly impact my life much, so it’s ok for me to be a little unsure about it and not have first hand evidence.

There are other topics that impact me much more directly than Higgs Boson, and thankfully those things are typically much easier for me to get evidence for. So I think the truth does indeed eventually come to fruition... but when we have vested moneyed interests pushing against the truth? Yikes, that makes things much more difficult.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#265

Post by mFixman »

civilized wrote: post #218
jefftk wrote: post #40

Here's the paper: https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/EPI-PT_Young-p... It's all correlational (observing that people with higher social media use are worse off in various ways). This approach is not capable of detecting reverse causation (people use social media more because they are unhappy) or third causes (something else causes people to both use more social media and also be unhappy)

It's funny how correlation proves causation the moment the science makes headlines.

The irony is that Hacker News, a prolific social media site, is publishing fake news about mental health in social media and making its users angrier.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#266

Post by SamBam »

oblio wrote: post #236
Bodell wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all personal anecdotal, and not intended to be a real argument either way. I have and have had internet in my house since I was 5-10. And I'd have to say: I'm still a misfit, social pariah, currently with no friends. Ironically the most respect (I mean this in the most basic sense of respect) I get from other humans is on here. But things were better when I was younger and worse now that I am 31. I'm not misr…

I'd say things are worse. Forums were a more personal experience. Fewer people, shared interests, avatars. Look at HN - how many commenters do you personally recognize, except for the ones that are popular because they're part of YC (so for things outside of this discussion forum) or because they also submit articles they're written (so again for things outside of this forum)? I probably recognize maybe 10 people, an…

Yup. I really felt like I "knew" people on forums. I recognized their names. Our inside jokes were ones we had created.

These days I never recognize a single username on any forum (HN and Reddit, mostly), even tiny sub-reddits. The culture there is created by the masses, so there are plenty of in-jokes only because tens of thousands of people repeat them every week.

Twitter is the closest I have to a site where I recognize a stranger's voice and opinions. But that's typically one-sided -- even in small hobbiest groups, it tends to be the well-known producers talking to everyone else.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#268

Post by karmelapple »

kreeben wrote: post #162
Zelphyr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about the times I've lashed out, screamed and yelled at someone and you know what? It felt pretty good. At first. Then I felt worse. WAY worse because I knew I had hurt the person I had yelled at. So I think you're right that while it is a release, it's an anti-productive one. One analogy I saw once likened it to having a balloon. You forgot to take out the trash this morning--the balloon got blown up a littl…

I suppose you're right. Lashing out is not a slow release of the pressure within that will save you from popping your balloon, it's the pop itself. Not all people have set up a structure in their lives that allow them to slowly release that pressure. We do not all have people in our lives that we can talk to about our feelings. Social media might help these folks. If I were to lash out at you during lunch or while we…

The algorithms that all major social media sites are in large part to blame.

If the algorithms didn’t exist, the most recent would appear first.

If the algorithms were tuned differently, NLP could be used to pick out the most thoughtful and caring messages to show people, rather than the most liked or most emotionally charged.

I think any social media company using an algorithm should be responsible for what they show, since they have switched from publishing everything to picking winners and losers.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#269

Post by 908087 »

It also damages adults' mental health, and a large portion of my friends, family members and acquaintances are living proof of that.

The past year in particular has severely damaged not only their mental health, but their grasp on reality itself. I don't really know where we go from here, but the path we're on isn't sustainable.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#270

Post by [deleted] »

oblio wrote: post #236
Bodell wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all personal anecdotal, and not intended to be a real argument either way. I have and have had internet in my house since I was 5-10. And I'd have to say: I'm still a misfit, social pariah, currently with no friends. Ironically the most respect (I mean this in the most basic sense of respect) I get from other humans is on here. But things were better when I was younger and worse now that I am 31. I'm not misr…

I'd say things are worse. Forums were a more personal experience. Fewer people, shared interests, avatars. Look at HN - how many commenters do you personally recognize, except for the ones that are popular because they're part of YC (so for things outside of this discussion forum) or because they also submit articles they're written (so again for things outside of this forum)? I probably recognize maybe 10 people, an…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN