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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

#161

Post by cutler »

ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #97
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 think my wife is addicted, she will pick up her phone to do one thing but first goes to Facebook and scrolls, then she forgets what she was using her phone for. Maybe not addicted but she has a habit of going to Facebook every time she uses her phone.

To my partner the internet was down, not Facebook and Instagram. I tried to explain the difference but to no avail.

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

#162

Post by speedybird »

karaterobot wrote: post #156
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…

People talk about how boring Facebook is, but two days ago, when it went down for a few hours, it was all anybody talked about. There were multiple "Facebook is down!" threads here on HN, including a 1200+ comment thread about it. You can say "well, that was just morbid curiosity..." but then I'd ask for a pointer to another equally urgent response to an event. Any event. If all the smart kids find Facebook boring an…

A FAANG going down for hours is interesting even to people who don't associate with that company. You're trying to frame this as a contradiction, but it isn't.

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

#163

Post by spurgu »

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…

> Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore.

Same. But I've also stopped using Messenger lately, mostly because I haven't had much of a social life due to Covid. Messenger is super convenient though to get in touch with people, as you don't have to exchange phone numbers to be able to message someone you recently met. But at the same time I'm worried that years worth of my private communication are being stored unencrypted and eventually leaked, so I've been nudging friends I communicate with frequently off FB, successfully (Signal or Whatsapp).

All that said I do miss FB a bit, since a lot of actual friend updates happen there. I don't really understand people who complain about political bullshit. I suppose a) you don't have proper adblockers (if political ads are a thing in your area) and/or b) you are friends with the wrong people.

But also, as you say, people are too afraid to share the more intimate stuff that made it interesting and social in the first place. So it's kind of a dead end.

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

#164

Post by throwawaycities »

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…

Your post sounds an a lot like an addict “chasing the dragon”. Complete with how great it was in the beginning, how it’s no longer as good as it was you first started, how you are no longer satisfied and hoping for something new to come around that would be as good as when you first started using.

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

#165

Post by seoaeu »

speedybird wrote: post #160
afavour wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel as though it's impossible for anyone to write a thread on HN about Facebook without someone immediately coming in and saying that Facebook is stupid and they deleted their account years ago. Yeah, me too. But you usually don't have to look beyond your immediate family to find someone that uses Facebook (or at the very least an FB-owned property) a ton. We aren't typical!

If quitting facebook is framed as impossible, then those who want to quit will feel helpless. Posts like the one above are helpful because they tell people that there is hope. You can quit facebook. Should we tell alcoholics that they'll never quit and their plight is hopeless? Or do we amplify the voices of those who succeeded in quitting, in the hopes that others may find inspiration to do the same? I'll do the lat…

What we shouldn't do is amplify the voices of people who were never addicted in the first place. That doesn't provide hope, if anything it works to de-legitimize how challenging quitting can be

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

#166

Post by speedybird »

ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #97
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 think my wife is addicted, she will pick up her phone to do one thing but first goes to Facebook and scrolls, then she forgets what she was using her phone for. Maybe not addicted but she has a habit of going to Facebook every time she uses her phone.

"Addiction is a biopsychosocial disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences."

"Despite adverse consequences" is a key component of addiction. For instance, many people can consume alcohol fairly regularly without the alcohol causing trouble for them. But if the alcohol starts to get in the way of work or disrupt your family life, that is a textbook warning sign of alcoholism.

If her compulsive use of facebook is getting in the way of things she wanted to do instead, that sounds an awful lot like addiction.

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

#167

Post by ewzimm »

rvbissell wrote: post #116
ewzimm wrote: post #15

Does anyone else find it hard to personally connect with the well-researched claim that people respond with a fight-or-flight response to ideas that challenge their core beliefs? I've always found ideas to be more interesting the more they challenge my core beliefs. This is true of math and science, but especially true of things like religion. I remember how wonderful it was as a teenager to find challenges to the id…

I suspect it depends on how much social and psychological equity you have invested in the core beliefs, when they get challenged. If you've never experienced much indoctrination, I can completely understand why it would be hard for you to relate.

I’m not sure what you would consider indoctrination, but I was raised in a traditional religion and was considering a religious career when I started debating doctrinal issues with others. It wasn’t a lightly made decision to admit that some of my opponents had better arguments, but I was more grateful to be educated than disappointed that I had been wrong. I have always preferred the knowledge that comes from losing to a worthy opponent to the satisfaction of winning an argument.

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

#168

Post by InitialLastName »

karaterobot wrote: post #156
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…

People talk about how boring Facebook is, but two days ago, when it went down for a few hours, it was all anybody talked about. There were multiple "Facebook is down!" threads here on HN, including a 1200+ comment thread about it. You can say "well, that was just morbid curiosity..." but then I'd ask for a pointer to another equally urgent response to an event. Any event. If all the smart kids find Facebook boring an…

There's a difference between Facebook, Inc (the company whose services were down) and facebook.com (the website that this article is about, which people are saying is "over").

It wasn't just Facebook (the social media website) that was down, though; it was Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down (if you're keeping score, that's 3-4 of the top 10 apps for both iOS and Android, depending on how you count Messenger), a large number of services that (surprisingly to many people) turned out to depend on Facebook's services, and a general firestorm of DNS DDOS's from services trying to access Facebook.com. That turns into a large portion of the internet behaving badly, not even counting that Whatsapp is the commons on which much of the non-US world's communications are built.

Besides all that, it's unusual for such a globally major website to be down at all, much less for hours. From a reliability perspective, that ~6 hours that Facebook's systems were down sets them an upper limit of 99.93% availability for the year.

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

#169

Post by Lamad123 »

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 use messenger only on desktop but it is painfully slow.. Even message notifications load after many seconds

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

#170

Post by speedybird »

seoaeu wrote: post #165
speedybird wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If quitting facebook is framed as impossible, then those who want to quit will feel helpless. Posts like the one above are helpful because they tell people that there is hope. You can quit facebook. Should we tell alcoholics that they'll never quit and their plight is hopeless? Or do we amplify the voices of those who succeeded in quitting, in the hopes that others may find inspiration to do the same? I'll do the lat…

What we shouldn't do is amplify the voices of people who were never addicted in the first place. That doesn't provide hope, if anything it works to de-legitimize how challenging quitting can be

My read of captainmuon's comment is that captainmuon once considered themself addicted to facebook.
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