Social media will be the smoking of our generation. In a century, they’ll wonder how we could possibly have kept engaging knowing the harm we were doing to ourselves.
Is the harm really on that level? What is the magnitude of harm?
Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
191–200 of 263 posts
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Reddit is vote based so would you include that too? HN also has advertising (it has hiring ads for ycombinator companies put in as mostly organic-looking posts with no [ad] tag).
I don't want to get into an argument about what an ad is, but I think we all understand what the difference of ad driven algos on the social platforms vs hiring blogs, Who's Hiring, etc on this platform.
Also, I just never have liked Reddit.
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#193I'd like to see similar study about the original gateway drug: "24-hour News Channels", which was followed by "24-hour Outrage-News Channels". Seems like we've been building toward this, the interactivity of the internet was the paradigm shift (to use a 90's term). EDIT: I realize it isn't news messing with youths' self-esteem (well, in some cases it is), but it is related in that the media is custom-made to drive en…
We have been gamified. But then again spending 6 hours a day reading celebrity magazines to r watching daytime TV will equally rot our sense of balance.
We some how think this would be six hours replaced with "improving our minds", visiting museums and working on our calculus or oil painting.
I mean we could all do that. we more or less force our children to do that at school.
If there was a "improve my mind" button on facebook, do you think we would all press it?
I am torn between my pessimism and optimism
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#194I'd like to see similar study about the original gateway drug: "24-hour News Channels", which was followed by "24-hour Outrage-News Channels". Seems like we've been building toward this, the interactivity of the internet was the paradigm shift (to use a 90's term). EDIT: I realize it isn't news messing with youths' self-esteem (well, in some cases it is), but it is related in that the media is custom-made to drive en…
We have been gamified. But then again spending 6 hours a day reading celebrity magazines to r watching daytime TV will equally rot our sense of balance. We some how think this would be six hours replaced with "improving our minds", visiting museums and working on our calculus or oil painting. I mean we could all do that. we more or less force our children to do that at school. If there was a "improve my mind" button…
National parks in the US experienced a surge in interest after the covid lockdowns. I have hope that while more people might be falling into the unhealthy trap of news and social media - a lot of people are breaking free and exploring the world and it's people and places.
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society
Why stop there? Why not Fr. Coughlin or William Jennings Bryan?
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a low-effort, shallow dismissal that doesn't even address anything specific to the article. If you have specific criticism regarding the methodology of this study - which doesn't, prima facie, appear unsound - please let the rest of us participate.
Unfortunately I was not able to locate a preprint for the paper itself, so we only have this article summarizing. First I'll say that without preregistration of the methodology, there's a lot that is immediately suspicious. > The researchers built an index based on 15 relevant questions in the NCHA, in which students were asked about their mental health in the past year Why these 15? What was the "relevance" criteria…
It is a working paper and you can find the whole paper here:
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#197Link to the working paper is here:
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
One can trace that lineage in conservative thought back to the John Birch Society. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society
Why stop there? Why not Fr. Coughlin or William Jennings Bryan?
Why stop there Girolamo Savonarola was doing it in the 15th century, or Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#199I wonder how people continue to work at Facebook. I know they tend to have the highest salaries from the FAANG groups, but still. We, as engineers and builders, have the responsibility to think critically about how the things we are working on will be used.
Playing video games or trading have similiar effects or worse. Engineers who build those platforms should question themselves too.
Re: Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
#200I wonder how people continue to work at Facebook. I know they tend to have the highest salaries from the FAANG groups, but still. We, as engineers and builders, have the responsibility to think critically about how the things we are working on will be used.
I wonder how people can continue to post questions like this to HN, when there are billions of people who happily use Facebook. I would think it's our responsibility to look outside of our narrow information bubble.
That's, uh...pretty ignorant of the fact that most of the people in the IT world are infinitely more aware of how damaging FB and most social media sites are than the average person. Come on.