A worthwhile read in the same vein
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-faceb...
Facebook use 'makes people feel worse about themselves'
21–30 of 75 posts
Re: Facebook use 'makes people feel worse about themselves'
#2282 participants. 3 participants did not complete. 1 person excluded as inconsistent > 4SD. Study comes down to: Participants were text-messaged 5 times per day between 10am and midnight over 14-days. """ Each text-message contained a link to an online survey, which asked participants to answer five questions using a slider scale: (1) How do you feel right now? (very positive [0] to very negative [100]; M = 37.47, SD…
Also, every participant was an undergrad at a single university - not that that's an uncommon thing for psych studies!
Re: Facebook use 'makes people feel worse about themselves'
#23I've found that oddly enough, reddit has a kind of honesty that facebook doesn't, which you wouldn't think, since the former is full of people you don't know, and the latter full of people you do.
The people you know have something to prove
It comes from the failed assumption that those you know are those you can be more honest with, since they want to see you succeed. Otherwise, why are you friends?
That ends up not being the case, since most people aren't very discerning with whom they accept friend requests from, and facebook encourages making as many connections as possible as well.
As a result, the only current way to be honest online is through anonymity. I'm not sure if Path App has made any headway in this regard.
Re: Facebook use 'makes people feel worse about themselves'
#24I've thought about this before. Facebook, especially on Sunday or Monday morning (read: post weekend) is like a highlight reel of your friends' life. So if you had a particularly boring weekend and see nothing but pictures of people having a great time (in your absence, mind you), of course you'll feel bad.
Re: Facebook use 'makes people feel worse about themselves'
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Going on Facebook, I see how everyone's social life is better than mine. Going on Hacker News, I see how everyone's startup is doing better than my failed attempt. Going on Hackaday, I see how everyone's working on cooler projects than mine. The only place I feel good about myself is at work.
Everyone publishes the awesome shit they do. Nobody publishes constantly things they suck at, things they failed at, things they won't attain.
Exactly. Don't compare your insides to other people's outsides.
Re: Facebook use 'makes people feel worse about themselves'
#26I'm currently in-between girlfriends, and even though it is silly, I admit that I feel a pang of jealousy when my friends post pictures on Facebook showing how happy they are with their significant others. So even though this article talks about a shaky self-reported study with a low sample size, I think they are absolutely on to something. I can relate to the findings almost perfectly.
Facebook is one big game of "keeping up with the Jonases." Everyone's Facebook-facing life is fantastic. They buy houses, they have kids, they go on trips, they have fun adventures with their girlfriends, and so on.
What you don't see is the cockroach infestation at the new house they bought, or the sickness their kid is going through, or the fact that they had to max out their credit card for their trip, or that they got in a huge fight with their s/o right after posting pictures of hugs and kisses.
What this means is that browsing through Facebook is a great way to make yourself feel awful, because at any point in time you are not going to have one of the things you see on your news feed. At least I feel that way. The only reason I'm still on there is because my mom (who lives back home, in Turkey) freaks out when she doesn't see regular updates from me. She thinks something must have happened.
Re: Facebook use 'makes people feel worse about themselves'
#27I can relate to this study --- even though I am not a young adult like the subjects of this study. I stopped using Facebook a few months ago because I couldn't handle how it made me feel. I am bootstrapping a start-up ,working insane hours and depriving my family of the comforts/luxuries that I could have afforded when I had a corporate job. I am really happy that my friends are spending their summer vacation at reso…
Going on Facebook, I see how everyone's social life is better than mine. Going on Hacker News, I see how everyone's startup is doing better than my failed attempt. Going on Hackaday, I see how everyone's working on cooler projects than mine. The only place I feel good about myself is at work.
Embrace indifference and you'll feel equally good* about yourself everywhere.
* or bad. Or meh. Especially meh.
Re: Facebook use 'makes people feel worse about themselves'
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Going on Facebook, I see how everyone's social life is better than mine. Going on Hacker News, I see how everyone's startup is doing better than my failed attempt. Going on Hackaday, I see how everyone's working on cooler projects than mine. The only place I feel good about myself is at work.
Everyone publishes the awesome shit they do. Nobody publishes constantly things they suck at, things they failed at, things they won't attain.
I was about to say the same thing! Surviorship Bias. It applies to everything you mentioned (Facebook, HN, HackADay) http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
Re: Facebook use 'makes people feel worse about themselves'
#29As a lonely, single, childless, unpropertied, mediocre 35-year-old, any exposure to anybody else's life, excepting the homeless, makes me feel worse about myself.
Re: Facebook use 'makes people feel worse about themselves'
#30The underlying cause of Facebook feeling depressing is that the corpus of Facebook posts you see are not drawn from a random population of moments of your friends' lives. There's an enormous sampling bias created by the sources self-selecting for interesting bits of activity. For every post you see from someone at a hot concert, there's ten other friends who didn't post about their mundane day at work or lazy weekend.
If you have 52 friends who each go on vacation for one week out of the year, then every week Facebook will be showing you somebody's awesome vacation updates. This does not mean that you're missing out or living less life for not being on vacation that particular week.
It's natural to compare our moods and experiences with others. But the self-selected nature of Facebook posts means you'll always be losing that comparison, since you see the highlights and outlying data points in relation to your own average. Once you consciously understand this and correct your mood for it, Facebook becomes a lot less of a downer.