No date on the article?
19 September 2022, for the record.
Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
151–160 of 263 posts
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, engagement at all cost it is, but there is a fundamental difference. Television required professionals where even wrestling and reality TV is scripted: it requires some sort of willful ignorance from the viewer to engage with it. Social media pushes the illusion that you are not engaging with professionals but peers, and the dominant signals (how many views, likes, comments, etc.) of this day and age were not…
I don't really agree with this. Rush Limbaugh successfully ran a platform on mostly entirely television that deeply poisoned the cultural landscape of the USA at the time (he was defending Reagan's neglect of HIV/AIDS and playing "another one bites the dust" when Freddie Mercury died), and laid the foundation on current polarized rhetoric strategies. He spread lies that Obama wasn't a natural born citizen. He blamed…
I believe Rush did become famous on television, but after the mid-90s it was really all about his radio program. So it might be to your point, fundamentally it isn't the internet, or TV, maybe it was radio.
I do believe that the Rush style radio talk show lays the foundation for Tucker Carlson and all of the conservative pundit TV programming. Which is the basis for the problems we see with Facebook / Fake News etc.
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really agree with this. Rush Limbaugh successfully ran a platform on mostly entirely television that deeply poisoned the cultural landscape of the USA at the time (he was defending Reagan's neglect of HIV/AIDS and playing "another one bites the dust" when Freddie Mercury died), and laid the foundation on current polarized rhetoric strategies. He spread lies that Obama wasn't a natural born citizen. He blamed…
Quoted post unavailable.
It's pretty lame to make fun of a guy dying of AIDS because you hate that he is gay. Not chad at all. Very weak.
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#154I'm starting to suspect HN to have the same effect, the more I read HN the more unmotivated I feel.
Unfavorable comparisons with "successful" people/projects who make it to the front page could be behind the same effects.
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#155Facebook was just the beginning. It feels crude almost in comparison to the new generation of designer drugs (TikTok et. al).
Although TikTok is fairly addictive, I find it's far better at showing you content you actually like instead of outrage/emotional/clickbait content. It's very easy to get into niches you actually enjoy with actual decent content (woodworking, cleaning, plants, DIY, cats in my case, for example) and actual people as creators, instead of whatever reposted content factory managed to cheat FB/Instagram algorithm this tim…
TikTok has great content and I am far more entertained and educated there than any other of the engagement-driven "social media" apps (i.e. Meta products).
The problem I find is that it is basically mindless engagement, everything is really too short to get into it, the comments are garbage, and it's extremely entertaining and therefore addictive and a waste of my free time.
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really agree with this. Rush Limbaugh successfully ran a platform on mostly entirely television that deeply poisoned the cultural landscape of the USA at the time (he was defending Reagan's neglect of HIV/AIDS and playing "another one bites the dust" when Freddie Mercury died), and laid the foundation on current polarized rhetoric strategies. He spread lies that Obama wasn't a natural born citizen. He blamed…
I believe Rush did become famous on television, but after the mid-90s it was really all about his radio program. So it might be to your point, fundamentally it isn't the internet, or TV, maybe it was radio. I do believe that the Rush style radio talk show lays the foundation for Tucker Carlson and all of the conservative pundit TV programming. Which is the basis for the problems we see with Facebook / Fake News etc.
One can trace that lineage in conservative thought back to the John Birch Society.
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate that I was baited into taking a closer look at this rather than just sticking with my trite dismissal. I did locate a preprint of the paper [1], but have not yet looked at it to determine if any of my above criticisms hold water. Nonetheless I remain blithely confident that this study is not going to be the one to break the mold. [1] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/256787/1/1801812535....
So it is a low-effort shallow dismissal then?
Certainly a dismissal but at this point it seems rather disingenuous to call it low-effort and shallow.
(Also, please consider this friendly piece of advice: check yourself!)
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
- brought to you by the academic fields that can reliably predict almost nothing.
I'm happy that at least a decent portion the comments here are treating this with the same skepticism as other studies on HN. I was actually expecting people to accept it because of the hate towards Facebook.
Facebook has an earned reputation, not hate.
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This is a tragedy of the commons situation because people cannot help themselves. SOME people cannot help themselves. I spend 0 minutes on social platforms. I can help myself just fine. Some people have much more addictive personality traits than others. Please, don't paint everyone with the same broad brush. It doesn't help the conversation in a meaningful manner
First off you’re on hn, which is social media and absolutely optimized for your specific engagement. I also figured the “some” was implied because the world is a complicated place. I do believe we all have our weaknesses, though mindless consumption is more attractive to some than others.
If you equate HN to actual social platforms then okay.
The HN "algo" is user driven by fellow readers up-voting/down-voting which is much more common interests. There are no "friend" relations on HN. The other platforms are all advertising based algo driven with intentional doping to make people addicted to the platform. This isn't even apples-to-oranges comparison.
After the dust from Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers settles and everything gets evaluated, I sincerly hope that Meta/Zuck,et.al gets investigated in the same line as Purdue.
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the original claim is that 'facebook is damaging to (and beyond) its users', then the response 'but it has _many_ users' isn't much of a defense..
I think the original claim is that "facebook is damaging to some users". You could say the same about salt. People still work in salt mines.
I'm not really able to wrap my head around your argument.
If it's damaging to some percentage of users, having more users means it damages more people.
Is your argument that this is okay because some people also put their health at risk being salt miners?