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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

#211

Post by agumonkey »

khazhoux wrote: post #183

For everyone here who --like me-- has never bought into Facebook, and never gotten hooked on it, congratulations. We are free of the Facebook dopamine dispenser, unlike our poor friends and family. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go refresh the HN front page for the 10th time today, and after checking how many upvotes I got on my latest comments, don't mind if I jump back over to reddit for a while, and then b…

I had a similar realization a few years back. All these petty average Joe scrolling selfies and trendy deals doing nothing.

I, on the other side, am scrolling hn, lambdartheultimate, Haskell subs and discords, hoarding caml research papers... doing nothing. I was mostly a snub variant of the above.

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

#212

Post by lurquer »

khazhoux wrote: post #183

For everyone here who --like me-- has never bought into Facebook, and never gotten hooked on it, congratulations. We are free of the Facebook dopamine dispenser, unlike our poor friends and family. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go refresh the HN front page for the 10th time today, and after checking how many upvotes I got on my latest comments, don't mind if I jump back over to reddit for a while, and then b…

I’m just waiting till I reach 1000. I’m at 995... I get up to 999, and then I fuck up and make an anti-vaccine post and plummet back to the 980’s.

Once I hit 1000, I’m outa here. Promise.

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

#213

Post by spywaregorilla »

I don't find any particular service difficult to quit, but its pretty much impossible to never be on some sort of dopamine grinder on some level.

Video games are a nice escape hatch in this way. If you pivot to a game, and then beat the game, there's a moment of nothingness where you have nothing gripping your attention constantly. Or at least that's my experience.

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

#214

Post by afarviral »

khazhoux wrote: post #183

For everyone here who --like me-- has never bought into Facebook, and never gotten hooked on it, congratulations. We are free of the Facebook dopamine dispenser, unlike our poor friends and family. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go refresh the HN front page for the 10th time today, and after checking how many upvotes I got on my latest comments, don't mind if I jump back over to reddit for a while, and then b…

ouch... this struck home.

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

#215

Post by 63 »

pedroma wrote: post #200
alchemyromcom wrote: post #58

I personally found Facebook hard to quit, but not entirely impossible. I would compare it to giving up cigarettes: not easy, but I got through it. I am coming to terms with the fact that I have have a very serious and damaging internet addiction, however. Like many serious addictions, there's a lot of shame attached to my real addiction, which is 4chan. 4chan is like being addicted to heroin. Every day is a battle to…

Nobody quits that website. I've tried a few times. Meanwhile I was able to quit FB in one evening and haven't been back.

I quit the website some years ago, though I never posted or commented very often to begin with. Once I managed to get off it for long enough, going back became shocking. Seeing /b/ with fresh eyes made me never want to go back, and I haven't. There are better places.

I have a similar story with Reddit, though that addiction was more recent and harder to break.

Facebook was easy. I refuse to use Twitter or Tiktok because I know what will happen.

I don't think my HN problem is quite bad enough to want to quit entirely, but I do want to read it less. The same goes for Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. Moderation is proving to be much harder than quitting entirely.

I think I'm very lucky because my interactions with social media tend to be very reserved. I almost never post anything anywhere, I just passively consume.

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

#216

Post by sandworm101 »

khazhoux wrote: post #183

For everyone here who --like me-- has never bought into Facebook, and never gotten hooked on it, congratulations. We are free of the Facebook dopamine dispenser, unlike our poor friends and family. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go refresh the HN front page for the 10th time today, and after checking how many upvotes I got on my latest comments, don't mind if I jump back over to reddit for a while, and then b…

Except that on HN I have actually learned a things or two. I have been connected to useful articles on topics that have solved many of my tech problems in recent years. Nobody has ever gotten anything useful from a facebook news feed.

The core difference is that while Facebook seeks to keep our eyes on facebook, places like HN actively encourage people to post links to material outside the core service. HN doesn't try to keep eyeballs on targets. (And HN is so tiny that it loads faster than anything on work connection out in the middle of nowhere.)

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

#217

Post by Radim »

lurquer wrote: post #212
khazhoux wrote: post #183

For everyone here who --like me-- has never bought into Facebook, and never gotten hooked on it, congratulations. We are free of the Facebook dopamine dispenser, unlike our poor friends and family. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go refresh the HN front page for the 10th time today, and after checking how many upvotes I got on my latest comments, don't mind if I jump back over to reddit for a while, and then b…

I’m just waiting till I reach 1000. I’m at 995... I get up to 999, and then I fuck up and make an anti-vaccine post and plummet back to the 980’s. Once I hit 1000, I’m outa here. Promise.

FWIW, I found your past comments articulate and well-supported. Please don't take the downvoting herds too much to heart – there was no "fuck up" on your part :-)

BTW I upvoted a bunch of your comments right now, but apparently with no effect to your karma. You (or I?) may have angered the HN algo gods.

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

#218

Post by smsm42 »

gotostatement wrote: post #83
smsm42 wrote: post #26

I find the premise ridiculous. I mean yes, there are people who are addicted to it. There are people who are addicted to lots of things, from playing video games to climbing ice-covered mountains. But the idea that it's harder to quit facebook than to get rid of, say, opioid dependency - which literally rewires your body's biochemistry - sounds like complete BS. Of course, if your life is so empty you have nothing to…

This has the same energy as the cigarette lobbyist in congress who talked about how smoking lettuce has the same health effects as smoking tobacco

This comment makes absolutely no sense. It looks like you are just seeking to associate me with something you consider bad (e.g. tobacco lobbyists) by something like "tobacco lobbyists are arguing they are right, this guy argues he's right, therefore clearly they are the same". Could you address the content of my argument instead?

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

#219

Post by smsm42 »

betwixthewires wrote: post #47
smsm42 wrote: post #26

I find the premise ridiculous. I mean yes, there are people who are addicted to it. There are people who are addicted to lots of things, from playing video games to climbing ice-covered mountains. But the idea that it's harder to quit facebook than to get rid of, say, opioid dependency - which literally rewires your body's biochemistry - sounds like complete BS. Of course, if your life is so empty you have nothing to…

I don't disagree with you, but I felt the need to point out the positive feedback loop in the scenario you laid out, that is, the more time you use Facebook the less you spend in your real life and so the alternative becomes weaker even if it was strong when you started. People who use Facebook compulsively didn't start out with no friends and family, if they had they'd have had no reason to create an account on the…

Well, yes, but that's true with pretty much everything. If you're addicted to reading Clancy novels, you spend more time reading Clancy novels and less time talking to friends, therefore Clancy novels are more addictive than heroin. Sounds ridiculous, right? Yes, there's a positive feedback dynamic in any addiction, every basic text on it mentions it. But that's no reason to jump to "most people never would be able to get rid of the habit". This dynamic can be overturned, and there are many tools to do it, and in this particular case it's easy - you body won't disintegrate and you would not feel like armies of Hell descended on you to torture you if you don't use facebook for a week.

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

#220

Post by khazhoux »

sandworm101 wrote: post #216
khazhoux wrote: post #183

For everyone here who --like me-- has never bought into Facebook, and never gotten hooked on it, congratulations. We are free of the Facebook dopamine dispenser, unlike our poor friends and family. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go refresh the HN front page for the 10th time today, and after checking how many upvotes I got on my latest comments, don't mind if I jump back over to reddit for a while, and then b…

Except that on HN I have actually learned a things or two. I have been connected to useful articles on topics that have solved many of my tech problems in recent years. Nobody has ever gotten anything useful from a facebook news feed. The core difference is that while Facebook seeks to keep our eyes on facebook, places like HN actively encourage people to post links to material outside the core service. HN doesn't tr…

> Nobody has ever gotten anything useful from a facebook news feed.

Millions of people disagree, and frankly it's not our place to judge what is useful for others. It's not all snark and misinformation.

> The core difference is that while Facebook seeks to keep our eyes on facebook, places like HN actively encourage people to post links to material outside the core service.

But that's just an opinion, that staying on-site on FB is somehow bad. They would argue that they're encouraging users to hold discussions with people they know, highly social and relatively unmoderated.

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