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Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

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Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#61

Post by wintermutestwin »

yosito wrote: post #51
captainmuon wrote: post #14

Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore. It used to be addictive, before social media, when it was a social network. You were interacting with real people, you could meet new people, "stalk" people you know IRL, share stuff about yourself or find out stuff about others. You would try to find your crush on FB and check see if you have common acquaintances…

> I wish someone would make a site like that again! On a technical level, it's not hard. On business level, it's doubtful if there's a compelling enough business model to prevent it from becoming another surveillance capitalism platform. And on a societal level, it seems impossible that living generations will ever trust a platform en masse again enough to achieve such ubiquity.

Non-profit would be a perfect business model. It isn't like that level of functionality requires a multi $B company to run it.

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#63

Post by HPsquared »

ben_w wrote: post #54
captainmuon wrote: post #14

Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore. It used to be addictive, before social media, when it was a social network. You were interacting with real people, you could meet new people, "stalk" people you know IRL, share stuff about yourself or find out stuff about others. You would try to find your crush on FB and check see if you have common acquaintances…

What hooks people like us (whatever that means) isn’t necessarily what hooks normal people (ditto). Facebook has a massive training set at its disposal, claiming more monthly active users than humans have lifetime heartbeats. If FB isn’t chronically addictive for normal people with that sample size, then either (0) A/B testing isn’t as capable as we like to think it is, or (1) FB isn’t even trying anymore.

They don't necessarily need to target normal people, it's possible that over time they have optimized their site to attract those with certain traits that are most profitable.

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#65

Post by BitwiseFool »

ramoz wrote: post #19

The author who wrote this has tweeted, on average, 1-2x a day for 10 years. https://twitter.com/jaronschneider Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society (an information/propagation architecture that exploits how people process information, imo). For me, Facebook is nothing more than a hometown forum. I havent logged on in months.

>"Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society"

Absolutely. Not only are the people on Twitter much more toxic, the trending feed is way more prone to manipulation and influence campaigns. If I don't know someone directly on Facebook, I'm probably never going to see their stupid hot-takes. No such separation on Twitter. Also, whenever I scroll through Facebook, more than half the posts are advertisements anyways. It rarely shows me anything of value from my friends and somehow fixates on the same dozen people. Oddly, I was never even very friendly with those dozen in real life.

People say Facebook is dangerous because people fall into a loop of following content they already like and falling into grouptthink. Firstly, how in the world does not apply more strongly with Twitter? Second, on Twitter it is possible to bombard non-followers with repeated, biased, and motivated messaging. I think this is far more insidious because it creates a false sense of consensus and you can condition people to react a certain way with repeated messaging. And, these users don't even need to actively follow the influencers' accounts.

Edit: I don't even follow people like "Brooklyn Dad, Defiant!", "Duty to Warn", or "Palmer Report", yet I am always seeing content from these paid influencers whenever I click on a trending topic. So imagine if you're not a partisan person and you consistently keep seeing messages from these kinds of accounts. Chances are, eventually, some of their tweets are going to influence how you think and give you a biased view of things.

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#66

Post by wintermutestwin »

nonameiguess wrote: post #29
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #17

Imagine if nicotine had network effects (edit: I mean as strong network effects as fb). You can't quit unless all your friends do too. I hear some alcoholics have a similar challenge when their social life revolves around drinking with peer pressure not to abstain.

It does. It's pretty common for friends groups to grow around everyone at a school, a dorm, an office, that take smoke breaks together.

True story: I once got a major promotion because the boss was a smoker and he overheard me talking about coding - "oh, you can code?"

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#67

Post by svachalek »

HPsquared wrote: post #63
ben_w wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What hooks people like us (whatever that means) isn’t necessarily what hooks normal people (ditto). Facebook has a massive training set at its disposal, claiming more monthly active users than humans have lifetime heartbeats. If FB isn’t chronically addictive for normal people with that sample size, then either (0) A/B testing isn’t as capable as we like to think it is, or (1) FB isn’t even trying anymore.

They don't necessarily need to target normal people, it's possible that over time they have optimized their site to attract those with certain traits that are most profitable.

This is sadly true. Genuine social interaction is rewarding but not addictive, as evidenced by thousands of years of history. And there's not a lot of ways to profit from it. On the other hand, getting people to come back every day or every hour for messages that compel them to buy things or vote a certain way is priceless to the right bidders.

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#68

Post by jazzyjackson »

treeman79 wrote: post #37
itake wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. My news feed is like 90% memes and ads. I have like 3 friends that actually make interesting text posts that foster discussions. Everything else is a waste cognitive energy.

I Facebook for support forums for autoimmune conditions. It is drastically better then Reddit for finding answers or suggestions. Every question gets dozens of answers many of which are very insightful and useful if repetitive. The sort of stuff that doctors don’t like to explain like my bloodwork says this what does that mean and what should I do next. people will have excellent answers.

how can you be sure that they're good answers?

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#70

Post by svachalek »

vishnugupta wrote: post #56

What I noticed about my son’s peer group is that FB just doesn’t occupy their mind share. It’s mostly Roblox, Minecraft, Netflix, YouTube or some other game. FB may well be an addictive space now but I suspect its growth has just about peaked. I keep hearing kids say that FB is something adults use and hence isn’t cool or trendy.

Those sound like pretty young kids. Teens are more actively seeking socialization, but they also gravitate to places adults aren't. Unfortunately it doesn't sound like the new generation of sites like Tiktok is any less insidious.
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