Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

nber.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 527 posts

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#251

Post by anshumankmr »

blitzar wrote: post #201
anshumankmr wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never too late you know... assuming you still have your catto.

Sadly passed as a dignified old cat many, many years ago now. The digital camera was barely a thing back then let alone a camera in your pocket 24 hours a day! Nevertheless, lots of happy memories captured in the only way that really matters - in person without a screen.

I understand your loss, I have also lost some cats, some due to moving and giving away, and other strays I used to take care of, breaks my heart every time I think of the strays.

Have you been able to adopt another pet?

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#252

Post by prmoustache »

Aromasin wrote: post #197
smelendez wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has moved heavily into group chats and I’m not sure it’s coming back. Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances. Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into…

Eh, I'd disagree on the Instagram front. If you look at the reels section, where most spend their time, it's just a more deplorable Tiktok. 80% of the content on there is soft core porn advertising one OnlyFans girl or another. The other 20% seems to be brain rot memes. I reinstalled it recently after 8 years of not having it, and immediately deleted it.

I guess it really depends if you have fed the algorithm with your preferences already.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#253

Post by throwawee »

lazide wrote: post #173
blitzar wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love LinkedIn cringe on instagram and twitter - but on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality that these people, often colleagues / former colleagues etc. are being serious

Well, serious in the same way cult members have to be serious. If you crack and admit it’s fake, everything falls apart and it’s your fault . Expulsion out onto the street follows. Even worse, now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time .

>now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time.

Not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's like professional wrestling, stage magic, or politics. Some lies people really love.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#254

Post by noduerme »

smelendez wrote: post #90
8s2ngy wrote: post #41

I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can…

This has moved heavily into group chats and I’m not sure it’s coming back. Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances. Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into…

Any way you cut it, "feeds" are more addictive. Your family and friends only post a couple times a day, but you have all day at work to look for some quick stimulation.

I watch my girlfriend devolve into this stuff. Waking up and scrolling endless feeds from reddit and insta; it's her entertainment. It's not so much worse than me waking up and scrolling Google News...maybe it's better, in that she gets less depressed about it. But it's fake. It's all fake.

In real life, it took me a whole year to figure out that the people at one particular local pub actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not around. I only figured out why they were so hostile because the people at my other pub told me. (It's that I'm Jewish, with Israeli family. Ironically, the nice people at the other pub who told me are Lebanese. We get along a lot better than I do with my old antifa "friends") This was a hard-to-get real world experience in how fucked up people can be for no reason. It's not something you can understand properly, ever, on any kind of social media. The media format just gets in the way of understanding other people as people; of understanding truth and factual reality; of differentiating between opinion and fact.

Feeds are garbage, optimized for chaos.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#255

Post by jtwoodhouse »

Grimblewald wrote: post #136
FlyingSnake wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto. 100%. Touché This has been my experience as well. I was a heavy lurker during peak Twitter phase, but I still got lots of value from it. I tried posting about tech and stuff and there’s absolute silence. No one cares anymore as if there are only tumbleweeds out there. I logged out of all my social media accounts (except HN) and moved them to hidden apps category. As a result I managed to read 3 lovely books an…

Because twitter has been gutted, its history the information sector equivallent of vulture capitalism. Take platform, gut its credibility and audience for some end goal (e.g. buying an election, redefining the truth in the minds of many) and leave a smouldering corpse behind. Twitter is dead, and its grave is marked with nothing more than an X.

Just came by to admire that last line.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#256

Post by codetrotter »

nottorp wrote: post #215
codetrotter wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a feeling it’s the kids’ fault. Look at how broad the definition on Wikipedia is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media I don’t think that’s the kids fault. Also, from that Wikipedia article: > Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, Letterboxd, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Viber, Reddit, Disc…

> Look at how broad the definition on Wikipedia is. But wikipedia doesn't make up definitions, just lists the commonly used meaning. > I think the problem actually is the adults that are not being specific about which problems they want to stop when they broadly say that social media is bad. Adults are also talking about cell phone addiction, like browsing FB/Instagram on your laptop is any better. > HN although diff…

> I thought it was human upvotes and maybe a few human mods

That’s the algorithm of HN :)

It computes the score of posts based on some combination of time since posted + number of comments + number of upvotes, etc.

> It would be interesting to determine why HN still works btw. It's a pretty unified community that is fairly large.

> Is the main reason that it's basically a non profit?

Yea I think so. Being driven not for profit, plus having a specific overarching guideline for what type of content belongs here;

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#257

Post by snozolli »

jeffhuys wrote: post #206
ghaff wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sense is that Twitter’s fall was an opportunity for a lot of people to just drop out. I know for me it’s become a very occasional thing and neither Bluesky nor Mastodon ever achieved critical mass. As far as I’m concerned the format is largely done. Never engaged with the political stuff.

And you all made place for guys like me; I don’t get booed away by 90% of the users anymore when engaging in discussion, more often I get an actual discussion out of it. Before that it was just a highly toxic “noo my opinion is the right one and I’m rigid on that and you’re an idiot” ambience. Funny how things shift like that. Also never engaged with political stuff.

The irony of the toxicity of your comments to ghaff is amazing. You know nothing about him, but made him the villain in your story.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#258

Post by rightbyte »

noduerme wrote: post #254
smelendez wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has moved heavily into group chats and I’m not sure it’s coming back. Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances. Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into…

Any way you cut it, "feeds" are more addictive. Your family and friends only post a couple times a day, but you have all day at work to look for some quick stimulation. I watch my girlfriend devolve into this stuff. Waking up and scrolling endless feeds from reddit and insta; it's her entertainment. It's not so much worse than me waking up and scrolling Google News...maybe it's better, in that she gets less depressed…

If the people in the pub don't show they hate you, they don't hate you. It might as well be the people in the other pub that are making stuff up about the others.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#259

Post by potato3732842 »

bigbacaloa wrote: post #104
safety1st wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is an important and often overlooked phenomenon actually. Studies of Internet engagement are filled with these skewed distributions that follow something like a Pareto principle, or I've heard it termed the 90-9-1 distribution in engagement where 90% of users just lurk a bit, 9% contribute casually, and then 1% are contributing like half of the content on the platform. It would follow logically that what…

These percentages are similar to those that one sees for alcohol consumption or problematic gambling. The business model of the casinos and the drug dealers and the alcohol venders is the same - you need a huge pool of unproblematic recreational users to find the problematic users who generate the bulk of your profits. The same model works for video games and social media.

I really hate this projecting of the software gaming industry's behavior back into the "original" vices.

The casino, liquor store and drug dealer all make the same margin regardless of who they're selling to. If anything the problem users are more likely to cause problems for them so they'd rather make the money on casual users and scale.

Having your whole operation be basically a wash except for all the money from a few people with problems is fairly unique to digital gaming and the software industry.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#260

Post by CuriouslyC »

polar8 wrote: post #139
CuriouslyC wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that small amounts of alcohol facilitate relaxation and socialization, which probably saves a lot more lives from preventing homicide and suicide than it costs in cancer and liver disease.

After socialization comes drunk driving which alone kills a quarter million people annually.

That's why I specified a small amount, there's a strong inverted U curve for alcohol for sure.
Post reply on HN